One of Latin America's most famous historical figures, Simon Bolivar has become a mythic symbol for many nations, empires, and revolutions used to support wildly diverse-sometimes opposite-ideas. From colonial Cuba to Nazi-occupied France to Cold War-era Slovenia, the image of "El Libertador" has variously signified loyalty, national unity, liberation, freedom, and revolt. In this volume, an array of international and interdisciplinary scholars shows the ways Bolivar has appeared over the last two centuries in painting, fiction, poetry, music, film, festival, dance, city planning, and even reliquary adoration. They illustrate how Bolivar's body has been exalted, reimagined, or fragmented in different contexts, taking on a range of meanings to represent the politics and poetics of today's national bodies. By critically analyzing many examples of cultural Bolivarianisms, or cults of Bolivar, this collection demonstrates the capacity of the arts and humanities to challenge and reinvent hegemonic icons and narratives and, therefore, to be vital to democracy.

In The Politics of Taste Ana Maria Reyes examines the works of Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzalez and Argentine-born art critic, Marta Traba, who championed Gonzalez's art during Colombia's National Front coalition government (1958-74). During this critical period in Latin American art, artistic practice, art criticism, and institutional objectives came into strenuous yet productive tension. While Gonzalez's triumphant debut excited critics who wanted to cast Colombian art as modern, sophisticated, and universal, her turn to urban lowbrow culture proved deeply unsettling. Traba praised Gonzalez's cursi (tacky) recycling aesthetic as daringly subversive and her strategic localism as resistant to U.S. cultural imperialism. Reyes reads Gonzalez's and Traba's complex visual and textual production and their intertwined careers against Cold War modernization programs that were deeply embedded in the elite's fear of the masses and designed to avert Cuban-inspired revolution. In so doing, Reyes provides fresh insights into Colombia's social anxieties and frustrations while highlighting how interrogations of taste became vital expressions of the growing discontent with the Colombian state.