Review: Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

In Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, Macarena Gómez-Barris offers a dynamic and refreshing understanding of art and social movements in the Americas as alternative modes of embracing the political that go beyond the confining paradigm of liberal democracy. Drawn from theories of transnational American Studies and decolonial methodologies that celebrate submerged perspectives and pluriversal relationality, the book’s origin was the author’s own disappointment with the turn to the Left in Latin American politics that arose in the 1990s and began to decline in the mid 2010s. Living in Quito in 2015 as a Fulbright Fellow at FLACSO, she witnessed, as she writes in the preface, how such post-neoliberal governments as that of President Rafael Correa in Ecuador had “turned against…social movements that had first brought them to power,” leading “on the ground, eco-feminist, transgender, artist, youth, and Indigenous activists [to] work collaboratively to...