Las artes son un modo de producción en cuyo interior se efectúan relaciones específicas, que son relaciones sociales determinadas por ideologías concretas. ¿Cómo se entienden estas relaciones específicas de producción del arte considerando su desarrollo paralelo al modo capitalista de producción? Ésta es la pregunta fundamental que Hacia una crítica de la economía política del arte busca problematizar. Se analizan en el texto algunos de los discursos teóricos fundamentales que han reflexionado acerca de estas relaciones sociales del arte, es decir, se ha examinado la reflexión teórica y filosófica respecto a las prácticas artísticas con el objeto de llegar a comprender cómo ésta ha sido una reflexión en torno a la autonomía de lo artístico que ha estado modelando ideológicamente las prácticas para determinarlas en el interior de relaciones sociales concretas. Esta reconstrucción del modo de producción artístico occidental, desde Marsilio Ficino en la Florencia del siglo XV hasta Rosalind Krauss en los años ochenta del siglo XX, pasando por Karl Philipp Moritz e Immanuel Kant en la Ilustración alemana, así como la relación entre arte y trabajo productivo en Karl Marx y William Morris, expone el modo de producción de las artes a través de los discursos que lo han pensado y configurado históricamente, ilustrando estos discursos a través de las prácticas concretas, a la vez que examinando críticamente la reflexión teórica en cuanto ideología del modo de producción. A este respecto, las nociones que en este ensayo se han analizado como parte de la práctica ideológico-constitutiva del modo de producción artístico han sido: la de la «poiesis» en relación al conocimiento de Dios, la de la «libertad» como paradigma de todo sujeto que es dueño de su «industria», la del trabajo productivo en relación a la dialéctica entre «producción» y «praxis», y la de la «propiedad» intelectual como forma de apropiación. Este ensayo busca ser un punto de partida para pensar el arte de otra forma, esto es, precisamente, como un modo de producción.

This anthology unites scholars from varied backgrounds with the notion that the theories and artistic productions of Bertolt Brecht are key missing links in bridging diverse discourses in social philosophy, theatre, consciousness studies, and aesthetics. It offers readers interdisciplinary perspectives that create unique dialogues between Brecht and important thinkers such as Althusser, Anders, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Godard, Marx, and Plato. While exploring salient topics such as consciousness, courage, ethics, political aesthetics, and representations of race and the body, it penetrates the philosophical Brecht seeing in him the never-ending dialectic—the idea, the theory, the narrative, the character that is never foreclosed. This book is an essential read for all those interested in Brecht as a socio-cultural theorist and for theatre practitioners. Contributors: Kevin S. Amidon, José María Durán, Felix J. Fuch, Philip Glahn, Jim Grilli, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Norman Roessler, Jeremy Spencer, Anthony Squiers, Peter Zazzali.

Toward the middle of the 1950s, abstract art became a dominant trend in the Latin American cultural scene. Many artists incorporated elements of abstraction into their rigorous artistic vocabularies, while at the same time, the representation of geometric lines and structures filtered into everyday life, appearing in textiles, posters, murals, and landscapes. The translation of a field-changing Spanish-language book, Abstract Crossings analyzes the relationship between, on the one hand, the emergence of abstract proposals in avant-garde groups and, on the other, the institutionalization and newfound hegemony of abstract poetics as part of Latin America’s imaginary of modernization. A profusion of mid-century artistic institutional exchanges between Argentina and Brazil makes a study of the trajectories of abstraction in these two countries particularly valuable. Examining the work of artists such as Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Tomás Maldonado, author María Amalia García rewrites the artistic history of the period and proposes a novel reading of the cultural dialogue between Argentina and Brazil. This is the first book in the new Studies on Latin American Art series, supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.

This book argues that the poetry of César Vallejo announces the event, as a moment of irruption of a truth that destabilises the usual state of reality. It studies the emergence of a subject who affirms a truth that exceeds the law, interrupts hegemonic repetition, asserts universal solidarity, and defends "lost causes" despite political failure. The author reconfigures the traditional reading of Vallejo only as a poet of pain and human suffering, and offers new ways of understanding the relationship between poetry and politics.

One of the prominent thinkers in the Social Sciences, Aníbal Quijano (1930–2018), has a fundamental work for the compression of contemporary dilemmas since his main theoretical and political concerns have always been linked to the mutations of world capitalism and its reverse paths. This book aims to contribute with analyses of his voluminous and diversified production distributed practically over 60 years of intellectual trajectory. In the first decades, the Peruvian author produced essential works on peasant movements, the urbanization process, and the class structure in Peru and Latin America by mobilizing sociological categories such as marginality, dependency and structural heterogeneity. He devoted himself to investigating imperialist domination in Peru and its implications for social classes and created the journal Sociedad y Política. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Peruvian sociologist published a set of texts on the coloniality and decoloniality of power, which represents a theoretical construction inseparable from the processes and experiences that were occurring in Peru, Latin America and the world, from the “globalization” of “neoliberalism” to global and local resistances. Thus, this book is addressed to all those, with or without specialized training in social sciences, interested in knowing not only the history of social sciences in Latin America but mainly in understanding the historical roots and the political dilemmas of peripheral capitalist societies.