How can we create a model of politics that reaches beyond the nation-state, and beyond settler-colonialism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism? In Beyond the Pink Tide, Macarena Gomez-Barris explores the alternatives of recent sonic, artistic, activist, visual, and embodied cultural production. By focusing on radical spaces of potential, including queer, youth, trans-feminist, Indigenous, and anticapitalist movements and artistic praxis, Gomez-Barris offers a timely call for a decolonial, transnational American Studies. She reveals the broad possibilities that emerge by refusing national borders in the Americas and by seeing and thinking beyond the frame of state-centered politics. Concrete social justice and transformation begin at the level of artistic, affective, and submerged political imaginaries-in Latin America and the United States, across South-South solidarities, and beyond.

Using culture as an entry point, and informed by the work of contemporary social theorists, the essays in this volume identify and challenge sites where the representational dimension of social life produces national identity through scripts of belonging, or traces.
The contributors utilize empirically based studies of social policy, political economy, and social institutions to offer a new way of looking at the creation of meaning, representation, and memory. They scrutinize subjects such as narratives in the U.S. coal industry's change from digging mines to removing mountaintops; war-related redress policies in post-World War II Japan; views of masculinity linked to tequila, Pancho Villa, and the Mexican Revolution; and the politics of subjectivity in 1970s political violence in Thailand.
Contributors: Sarah Banet-Weiser, U of Southern California; Barbara A. Barnes, U of California, Berkeley; Marie Sarita Gaytan; Avery F. Gordon, U of California, Santa Barbara; Tanya McNeill, U of California, Santa Cruz; Sudarat Musikawong, Willamette U; Akiko Naono, U of Kyushu; Rebecca R. Scott, U of Missouri.

""Where Memory Dwells" is a crucial contribution to the current debate on political violence. Macarena Gomez-Barris has researched exhaustively on the Chilean post-dictatorship to find the deep relationship between what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 and what is going on today, in Chile and in the world."--Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, University of Arkansas
"This book offers intriguing insights on the symbolic, aesthetic, and personal aspects of memory-making by activists, survivors, and artists during the afterlife of the Pinochet dictatorship. The author shows how specific cultural actors wrestle creatively with the dilemma of how to represent experiences of atrocity that defy our ability to know, narrate, and depict them, yet prove crucial to the building of a democratic culture."--Steve Stern, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor, University of Wisconsin
"Macarena Gomez-Barris takes the reader on an often personal journey through the 'memoryscape of terror' of the Chilean dictatorship in Chile and Chilean culture in exile. This book makes a poignant and compelling contribution to the study of traumatic memory in Latin America."--Marita Sturken, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication studies, New York University
""Where Memory Dwells" offers an immensely luminous rearticulation of the 1990s 'politics of memory' theme for the twenty-first century. Illustrating the profound relevance of memory studies to political theory, Gomez-Barris shows with great lucidity how the remembering and forgetting of state terror are entwined with global and local forces of the neoliberal economy, nationalism, and universal human rights discourse. "Where Memory Dwells" exemplifiesthe best efforts of a sociological approach to memory as cultural mediation of power. It should be read by anyone interested in the critical work that collective memory may perform for our societies in transition."--Lisa Yoneyama, Author of "Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory"
""Where Memory Dwells" is a creatively researched and exquisitely thoughtful study of the memory of state terror as it lives and hides in complex and politically activated cultural practices. Gomez-Barris's exploration of how authoritarianism and social injustice are remembered, forgotten, and redressed by nations, citizens, and exiles is a beautiful achievement, one with an immediate relevance for us today."--Avery F. Gordon, author of "Ghostly Matters"

In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gomez-Barris traces the political, aesthetic, and performative practices that emerge in opposition to the ruinous effects of extractive capital. The work of Indigenous activists, intellectuals, and artists in spaces Gomez-Barris labels extractive zones-majority indigenous regions in South America noted for their biodiversity and long history of exploitative natural resource extraction-resist and refuse the terms of racial capital and the continued legacies of colonialism. Extending decolonial theory with race, sexuality, and critical Indigenous studies, Gomez-Barris develops new vocabularies for alternative forms of social and political life. She shows how from Colombia to southern Chile artists like filmmaker Huichaqueo Perez and visual artist Carolina Caycedo formulate decolonial aesthetics. She also examines the decolonizing politics of a Bolivian anarcho-feminist collective and a coalition in eastern Ecuador that protects the region from oil drilling. In so doing, Gomez-Barris reveals the continued presence of colonial logics and locates emergent modes of living beyond the boundaries of destructive extractive capital.