Conclusion

Abstract

The conclusion brings together the arguments pursued throughout this book in two principal ways, proposing that we may approach these works as instances of a decolonial neobaroque and as calls for an environmental democracy, as envisioned by Enrique Leff. Many of the artists explored here stage a tactical return to baroque imaginaries, invoking the historical co-option of the baroque in Latin America as an instrument for anticolonial and anti-institutional expression, while redeploying its excess, heterogeneity, and performativity to explore post-anthropocentric perspectives on science and the living world. Reading their work as part of a decolonial baroque highlights ways in which they construct alternative modernities that are less exclusionary, while nevertheless remaining in close dialogue with European scientific, literary, and visual traditions. I mark key differences between the neobaroque in Latin America, a category proposed by several scholars that shares many characteristics with the disembedding effects of postmodernism’s subversion of authority and linear narratives, and the decolonial baroque I propose, which is more often a form of historical re-embedding with the specific aim of constructing a critique of Enlightment epistemologies and Eurocentric modernity.