"Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future is breathtakingly original in its proposal of a historically grounded decolonial lens; one that reanimates socially-engaged art practice as global, heterogenous, and context-specific." — Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the Museum of Modern Art"As neoconservatives and progressives vie over the shape of the future, Carlos Garrido Castellano beckons readers into an urgent, unfinished dialogue among active practitioners of decolonization. From sustained encounters with the 1960s anticolonial thought and praxis of Cape Verdean and Guinea Bissauan Amlcar Cabral and Trinidadian C. L. R. James to contemporary socially engaged Chilean, Indonesian, Latin American, Lebanese, and Ugandan aesthetic collectives, we enter into the unpredictable processes of specific collaborative experiments in radical Global Southern creative imagining. Giving material shape to how colonial 'pasts'—and those of brutal, civil conflict—haunt the present, such insurgent cultural workers refute empty claims to the demise of art's potential for social transformation. They and Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future urge us to join in reigniting the collective, socially led aesthetics that framed producing radically emancipated culture, human relations, institutions, and networks as nothing less than the creation of a new society. A fascinating, galvanizing, and important read!" — Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement"Boldly interrupting academic and mainstream art world attempts at normalizing socially engaged art, Carlos Garrido Castellano re-envisions its complex, historical narrative as an anti-colonial project that stretches from Beirut, Jakarta and Kampala, to Havana, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future points us to an important re-theorization of this influential contemporary art practice, making his book essential reading for all those seeking to map-out the transformative potential of cultural politics now, and in the decades to come." — Gregory Sholette, author of The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art"Carlos Garrido Castellano's Art Activism for an Anti-Colonial Future is a groundbreaking work. Castellano's book points the way for the future development of socially engaged art scholarship, as it expands beyond the geographic parochialism of Europe and North America and comes to terms with the rich complexity of artistic practice, and resistance, beyond the institutional artworld. The question of the post- and anticolonial is one of the most pressing issues in engaged art theory today, and Castellano is clearly at the cutting edge of this important research." — Grant Kester, author of Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art"Carlos Garrido Castellano's new book is both timely and timeless. Grappling in a most fluid and elegantly expressed way with social, aesthetic, and political problems of 'socially engaged art' across the planet, he is able to illuminate and suggest solutions to longstanding problems that have beset artists, writers, and intellectuals of all stripes in our globally connected world. He writes in a completely accessible way about deeply concerning issues. This book is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary art and culture." — Edward J. Sullivan, New York University"This is a capacious and nuanced discussion of the power and capacity of socially engaged art to carry forward the still unfinished task of decolonization, and offer an alternative way to visualize humanity. Garrido Castellano shows that artists from Indonesia to Lebanon, Uganda to Latin America, are extending the legacy of Amilcar Cabral, CLR James and other radical anti-colonialists through their heterogeneous art practices. In the process, they are offering urgent critiques of capitalism while also forging new anti-racist transnational connections." —Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania"Carlos Garrido Castellano's Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future poses the following question: How should we think through the relation between socially engaged art practices and traditions of decolonial criticism? In an elegant and wide-ranging argument, routed through the agonistic temporalities of the global South, Garrido Castellano urges us to recast our conventional understandings of histories of art and activism in such a way as to enable us to recognize those moments and conjunctures in which a creative visual labor disrupts and displaces the regulative norms of our neoliberal age. Like all generative provocations, this book will challenge us to unlearn as well as relearn the conceptual lexicons of contemporary aesthetic theory." — David Scott, Columbia University"I began this book with interest and continued with mounting excitement. Exploring alternative genealogies of socially engaged art, Garrido Castellano rescues artists' located emancipatory practices from the jaws of Western European and U.S. theories, bringing attention to how/where we begin: with collaborative, experimental and creative acts meant to dismantle, precisely, hegemonic histories." — Suzanne Lacy, Professor of Art and Design, University of Southern California
