Bloomsbury Academic Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance: A Cosmology of Unsociable Bodies (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)

About the Author Omar Rivera is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Southwestern University, USA. Product Description From pre-Columbian Inca stone architecture, through colonial paintings and rituals, and continuing in 20th- and 21st-century Andean photography and painting, Omar Rivera uncovers a lineage of conceptions of cosmologies as they have been expressed aesthetically in Andean philosophical traditions. In discovering this lineage, Rivera manifests a conception of the cosmos that is organized according to elemental ordersof earth, light, and water in particularand that underlies social forms. By providing the first aesthetic analysis of indigenous cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring two essential and interrelated concepts in Latin American decolonizing philosophies: racial embodiment and resistance. This systematic study of Andean cosmologies creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, theorists in Latin American thought and Anglo-American philosophers. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers such as María Lugones, Linda Martín Alcoff and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling our understanding of decolonial theory and opening the tradition as never before. Review "Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance will transform how we understand and engage decolonial theory. Rivera brilliantly moves beyond the more standard critical approaches to the impacts of colonialism and deeply engages Andean resistance. This beautifully written book attunes readers to resistant embodiments that exceed colonialism and opens paths to new worlds." --Nancy Tuana, DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University, USA"In this pathbreaking work Rivera engages Andean aesthetic thought without nostalgia or the intention of a "return" to an ideal indigenous past. In turning to the sense of Pacha as Cosmos in Andean thought he opens new possibilities for thinking political and social resistance and liberatory transformation beyond global and Westernizing critique, strategies, and ideological praxis. Rivera's book exposes the reader to affective and physical registers of resistance at concrete levels that in its pages begin to open for our time and beyond it. In short, Rivera's work is visionary and utopian while unlike any other." --Alejandro A. Vallega, Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Comparative Literature Department, University of Oregon, USA