Description:

In this lecture, Professor Laura Pérez (UC Berkeley) will talk about her recent book

Eros Ideologies, which theorizes decolonial aesthetics and spiritualities, activism,

queer performativity, and hemispheric culture in the context of Latina and

Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists. Offering radical reappraisals of

the art of Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Ester Hernández, and Ana Mendieta,

among others, whose histories and praxes have been obfuscated by Eurocentric

ideas, Pérez imagines the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in non-Western

spiritual understandings of the interdependence of all life-forms and the centrality

of care for self and others as the basis for a more responsible future. Professor

Pérez will consider strategies in artistic self-representation that counter Western

notions of selfhood through an identification with nature or the erotic, as well

discuss the ways in which Eurocentrism continues to affect and shape Latinx/Latin

American art worlds (scholarship, departments, museums, curation, aesthetics).