SOBERANÍAS OSCURAS EN AMÉRICA LATINA

This article is about a group of Latin American writers and artists whose work over the last two decades has challenged the optic transparency that has defined vision. I examine the figures of darkness, opacity, and blindness with the goal of producing a new statute of the image and its aesthetic and political function. I propose that these counter-luminary incursions privilege other measures that rethink the mechanics of the eyes and seek to abolish fixed certainties of modernity that limit knowledge. These Latin American poetics interrogate visuality, not only denouncing but also impugning its ability to subjugate knowledge and bodies. These writers, artists, and critics work in darkness to demonstrate the ways that light has served to disappear, disregard, and fragment peripheral bodies and their dark knowledge.