Early American Literature

To say that scholarship on material and visual culture is under pressure can surprise no one. Institutions holding artworks and Indigenous belongings from colonial settings worldwide face calls for redress, with increasing frequency and at times hostility. For Latin Americanists, repatriation catches the most frequent headlines. Yet ownership is only one trip hazard in this rocky terrain. Expertise developed through long hours of study—the once (seemingly) indisputable foundation for knowledge-creation—stills hold sway. Not for everyone, though. Not anymore. Writing about the Global South from intellectual and physical settings in the Global North rarely gets the pass it once did. Moreover, in Chile and Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico, national governments and local communities vie as often as they agree over ancestral heirlooms (not to mention land and sovereignty). When détente is forged, as it sometimes is, claims [End Page 137] to autonomy in Indigenous and Black communities pull into clearer view, but so, too, do the thirsty, sprawling roots of mestizaje. Things are messy, indeed. No less so because, as Avexnim Cojti Ren (Maya K'iche') reminds us, scholarship can have political and legal consequences in Latin America that extend well beyond any expressed academic, institutional, or museological intentions.¹

For readers of this journal, many of whom are well versed in Indigenous studies, this topography may appear unfamiliar, perhaps even belated. I can imagine a similar point voiced by archaeologists of Latin America, many of whom have become veterans at negotiating ethical and political debates. In art and architectural history, the disciplines featured in this review, the situation seems muddier. Among those who write about materials that predate Latin American nationhood—materials typically called (in English) ancient and colonial visual culture—there is wary recognition of shifting landscapes. For instance, many scholars now know that not every artwork or architectural space that sparks interest (or that "matters for their research") is as available for their interpretation as in times past. And collaborative work with Black and Indigenous scholars and elders is becoming more norm than exception in exhibition- and excavation-based work. The perspectives of contemporary Latin American, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous artists and their artworks also have a new and resonant presence, opening possibilities for bridging past with present.

It is tempting to call this work decolonial. Yet I hesitate. Art and architectural historians who study Latin America's colonial and ancient cultures rarely embrace decolonization explicitly—either in discourse or published practice.² While some scholars believe that decolonization means land back or nothing and have turned to anticolonial thinking instead, we should be honest: old disciplinary habits die hard. For good or for ill, many in the field are still taught to privilege objects over activism. And as it turns out, codependent relationships—of the kind that bind academics, museums, archives, and private collections (if not also archaeological sites)—are proving harder to unwind than most of us ever imagined. Moreover, Latin American national commitments to mestizaje constitute Indigeneity in ways that have yet to receive their due in most decolonial writing about the arts. How conditions in Bolivia might align with or model other decolonial projects—in Canada, Australia, or India—that jury is still out.³ It may run against the grain of contemporary politics to say this, but for Latin [End Page 138] Americanists, the term decolonial and its connotative forcefields can foreclose as much as they enable.

The books reviewed here by Michael Schreffler, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, and Lisa Trever respond to this mottled and riven terrain in varied ways, and knowingly so. The three share an interest in architecture—or perhaps, more accurately, architecturally articulated environments. All also challenge familiar disciplinary tropes. Notably, each performs its intellectual commitments, holding back on declarative assertion. Some...