The materialization of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) demonstrated that European enlightenment was not in fact universal, and, if it was, universality was not intended for those who existed under slavery and colonial rule.5 As Robin Blackburn states, “Haiti was not the first independent American state but it was the first to guarantee...

In response to the injustices and oppression suffered under Porfirio Díaz, outbreaks of rebellion occurred across Mexico throughout the Porfiriato.1 There was no single issue that motivated individuals to revolt, but reasons included various grievances related to land rights, labor disputes, lack of civil liberties, and an unjust and violent political...

The China that Mao Tse-tung officially took control of on the first day of October 1949 was a China ravaged by both internal and external wars, paranoid about its own failure to embrace the scientific developments witnessed elsewhere in the world, and with an inferiority complex bred from over a century of foreign exploitation in trade matters. The opium wars (1839–1842 and...

P.M.’s censorship immediately ignited a public debate within the intellectual community over the nature of cultural production and visual production in particular. The growing contentiousness of this debate was the catalyst for the speech “Words to the Intellectuals,” which Fidel Castro delivered on the steps of the National Library later that year.4 In...

This plurality is further instantiated in the poster’s top-most block of text, which, though written in Vietnamese, makes an appeal to the “world intellectual antiwar youth movement” (“tinh than phan chien cua thanh nien”) and, more specifically, American university students (“sinh vien My”). Why would this phrase be written in Vietnamese and not English,...

This historic—and unprecedented—galvanization was one of several across the globe, from Europe to the Caribbean to southern Africa, in support of Ethiopia, the only continuously independent African country. People of African descent across the Diaspora organized to arm themselves and defend Ethiopia from a European colonial power. Their actions precisely emphasized the...

More specifically, we shall argue that certain cultural spaces are situated at a crossroads: either they may lead to a revolution beneficial to the masses through the cultivation and support of various forms of cultural agency and cultural exchange or they may provide further subjugation of marginalized groups through evolving forms of economic and social hegemony. We thus plan to...

Hugo Chávez is a powerful example of the use of visual rhetoric to help render Venezuela’s story of origin. His appropriation of Bolívar’s image to help him retell Venezuelans this story is complicated. Venezuelans may be particularly susceptible to Chávez’s Bolívarian rendering of their history and national identity. John Lynch...

In this chapter, I discuss how a 2001 art project by the Buenos Aires–based activist collective Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group), in tune with the general feeling of discontent, articulated the connection between Argentina’s recent authoritarian past and the neoliberal economic model that led the country to its worst social, political, and economic crisis. Moreover, I...

The movement snowballed and quickly grew in size, incorporating students from other universities, members from civil society, intellectuals, and so forth. As this happened, #YoSoy132 drew on a two-pronged activist platform: (1) in favor of media democratization and political democratization nationwide and (2) a critique of the authoritarian Mexican political regime. Taking inspiration...

Theresa Avila is a scholar and curator of Latin American and Latin@ art and culture in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. Her recent work includes the coedited special issue in Third Text, Legacy of the Mexican Revolution at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and Imagined Regions: The ASU Simon Burrow Transborder Map Collection.

Disruptions is a series that interrogates and analyses disruptions within and across such fields and disciplines as culture and society, media and technology, literature and philosophy, aesthetics and politics.