The Complicities among Aesthetics: Colonization and Race by Carlos Rivera-Santana

This seminar de-romanticizes (mainly) European aesthetics through a reexamination of the birth of race within the colonization of the Americas and argues that the idea of race starts from an aesthetics of colonization. Drawing on the vast European visual culture of monsters this seminar shows how Indigenous and, later, African peoples were framed from this history of an aesthetics of monstrosity, and largely from a Western aesthetics of ugliness. Thus, we see how European aesthetics created the conditions of possibilities, within colonization, for the birth of race as one of the main markers of inequality.

BIO: Carlos Rivera Santana is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William & Mary and was recently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges (CAIK), University of Technology of Sydney, Australia. Rivera Santana is a Caribbean/Latin American cultural studies scholar specializing in Indigenous studies, Caribbean visual culture and decolonial theories. He is the author of the book, Archaeology of Colonisation: From Aesthetics to Biopolitics and is currently working on a second book with renowned Puerto Rican artist Diógenes Ballester entitled Puerto Rican Visual Arts and its Decolonial Diasporic Character: An Arteologist Approach, signed with Centro Press—among other peer-viewed and art publications on decolonial aesthetics, coloniality, art theory, and art criticism and interviews with Latin(x) artists.