Macarena Gómez-Barris
Biographic Data
| ID | 72556 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Macarena Gómez-Barris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Macarena |
| FAMILY NAME | Gómez-Barris |
| SIGNATURE | GÓMEZ-BARRIS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6274-8661 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 166 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Dissolving into the surf
In this short piece I think about the ocean as queer and its liberating sensualities as a practice of writing into the surf. What are the dissolutions that emerge from the wetness of the sea? This piece is based on forthcoming work where I expand upon the themes of queer and trans ecologies at the sea's edge
Energy States
This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that ref…
At the Razor's Edge of Democracy
Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory
In their interview, scholar and writer Macarena Gómez-Barris and artist and performer Sebastián Calfuqueo discuss the role of art, mediation, and coloniality with respect to Indigenous majority spaces and trans embodiment. Calfuqueo's body of work, like Gómez-Barris's scholarship, addresses the colonial and neocolonial processes of extraction, dispossession, and how Mapuche peoples in the southern territories of Chile and the global South continu…
Sociality at the End of the World
This collectively written essay meditates on sociality, mediation, death, and life during Pandemic 2020
The Occupied Forest
Macarena Gómez-Barris looks at the work of Francisco Huichaqueo and of Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, identifying their potential to resist extractivist capitalism through alternative representations of the forest
Decolonial Gestures: Anarcho-Feminist Indigenous Critique
Submerged perspectives: The arts of land and water defense
It is through specific genealogies of scholarship on race and coloniality, Indigenous feminisms, and Black feminisms that we can escape the well-rehearsed trope of ‘land as body’. Within a comparative hemispheric American studies framework, I consider the centre of struggles over empire and extractivism that show the unravelling of the binary between embodiment and territories. I also consider submerged perspectives and forms of solidarity by tho…
Extractivisme énergétique: Entretien avec Macarena Gómez-Barris
Sarah Claire : En guise d’introduction, présentez-nous votre carrière intellectuelle. Comment en êtes-vous arrivée à vous intéresser aux logiques extractivistes des systèmes coloniaux en Amérique latine? Macarena Gómez-Barris : Je suis originaire du Chili et j’en suis partie en tant qu’exilée politique avec ma famille en 1973, peu après le coup d’État militaire. Ma mère a participé à diverses actions politiques et a travaillé pour le régime socia…
A dialogue on The Extractive Zone: Resistant sensoriums
Coloniality and Islands
How to Block the Extractive View
Research Article| October 01 2018 How to Block the Extractive View Macarena Gómez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris is chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and director of the Global South Center. She is the author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, which theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous …
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives
In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gómez-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 Gómez-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…
Inverted Visuality: Against the Flow of Extractivism
Mapuche Mnemonics
This essay addresses how indigenous memory haunts the Chilean nation as a past-present index of unaccounted-for discursive and material violence. This extends far beyond the forty-year window of memories about state terror and leftist "dissident" activity, although as many labor historians have documented, the twentieth century has been filled with antilabor massacres. The term past-present indexes the continuum of colonization within a web of ex…
Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly
With the 2012 ASA convention in Puerto Rico, "Dimensions of Empire and Resistance" as impetus, and the questions of coloniality and empire raised there fresh in our minds, this special issue of American Quarterly brings together research that rethinks the meaning of American studies from Latin American and Latinx studies. The issue calls attention to the historical complexities of colonial encounters and the making of liberal human rights regimes…
Andean Translations: New Age Tourism and Cultural Exchange in the Sacred Valley, Peru
Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, Peru's tourist industry has been organized around an obsession with the Incan past. One rapidly growing segment of the industry aims to allow tourists to experience the Q'ero mysticism of the highlands in a somewhat "authentic" context. A case study of a center of this spiritual tourism in the Sacred Valley of the Incas that focuses on the transmission of energy healing rites raises questions abo…
Toward a Sociology of the Trace
Visual Testimonies of Atrocity: Archives of Political Violence in Chile and Guatemala
In the aftermath of political violence in Latin America, the testimonial emerged as an important document of witness regarding the atrocities that had been committed in the region. In many cases, testimonies stood in for the absence of evidence, whereby archives of witness had been destroyed, hidden, or otherwise disappeared from public record. In this essay, the author analyzes forms of visual evidence in Guatemala and Chile, such as documentary…
Prologue: Traces in the Social World
Witness Citizenship: The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory
The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state-making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorializa…
Transnational meanings of La Virgen de Guadalupe: Religiosity, space and culture at Plaza Mexico
In this paper, we examine Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, California, a magnet for Latino communities from throughout the greater Los Angeles region, to show immigrants' use of space to produce transnational communities as coherent. One of the key ways that immigrant identity is formed in this space is through cultural religiosity. Despite the fact that Plaza Mexico is a shopping mall, the place gathers participation from Mexican immigrants and Latinos …
Where Memory DwellsCulture and State Violence in Chile: Culture and state violence in Chile
Ice and Political Heat: Cultural Memory Mediates the Past 2. Searching for Villa Grimaldi: Memory's Democratic Promise 3. Making Torture Visible: The Art of Guillermo Nunez in Chile's Transition 4. Documenting Absence: Ghostly Screens Unsettle the Past 5. Doubling 9/11: Exile Culture and Activism Conclusion: Rivers of Memory Notes Bibliography Index
Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico
Conceived and owned by Korean investors, the shopping mall Plaza Mexico in Southern California embodies a unique case of invention and commodification of traditions for locally-bound immigrants and US citizens of Mexican descent, showing the force of the contemporary processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorilisation of identities and the recreations of imagined conceptions of homeland. The Plaza is a unique architectural recreation of Mex…
Two 9/11s in a lifetime: Chilean art, terror and displacement
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives
In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gómez-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 Gómez-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…
Witness Citizenship: The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory
The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state-making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorializa…
Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly
With the 2012 ASA convention in Puerto Rico, "Dimensions of Empire and Resistance" as impetus, and the questions of coloniality and empire raised there fresh in our minds, this special issue of American Quarterly brings together research that rethinks the meaning of American studies from Latin American and Latinx studies. The issue calls attention to the historical complexities of colonial encounters and the making of liberal human rights regimes…
Coloniality and Islands
Andean Translations: New Age Tourism and Cultural Exchange in the Sacred Valley, Peru
Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, Peru's tourist industry has been organized around an obsession with the Incan past. One rapidly growing segment of the industry aims to allow tourists to experience the Q'ero mysticism of the highlands in a somewhat "authentic" context. A case study of a center of this spiritual tourism in the Sacred Valley of the Incas that focuses on the transmission of energy healing rites raises questions abo…
Submerged perspectives: The arts of land and water defense
It is through specific genealogies of scholarship on race and coloniality, Indigenous feminisms, and Black feminisms that we can escape the well-rehearsed trope of ‘land as body’. Within a comparative hemispheric American studies framework, I consider the centre of struggles over empire and extractivism that show the unravelling of the binary between embodiment and territories. I also consider submerged perspectives and forms of solidarity by tho…
How to Block the Extractive View
Research Article| October 01 2018 How to Block the Extractive View Macarena Gómez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris is chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and director of the Global South Center. She is the author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, which theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous …
Transnational meanings of La Virgen de Guadalupe: Religiosity, space and culture at Plaza Mexico
In this paper, we examine Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, California, a magnet for Latino communities from throughout the greater Los Angeles region, to show immigrants' use of space to produce transnational communities as coherent. One of the key ways that immigrant identity is formed in this space is through cultural religiosity. Despite the fact that Plaza Mexico is a shopping mall, the place gathers participation from Mexican immigrants and Latinos …
Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico
Conceived and owned by Korean investors, the shopping mall Plaza Mexico in Southern California embodies a unique case of invention and commodification of traditions for locally-bound immigrants and US citizens of Mexican descent, showing the force of the contemporary processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorilisation of identities and the recreations of imagined conceptions of homeland. The Plaza is a unique architectural recreation of Mex…
Energy States
This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that ref…
A dialogue on The Extractive Zone: Resistant sensoriums
Two 9/11s in a lifetime: Chilean art, terror and displacement
Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico
Conceived and owned by Korean investors, the shopping mall Plaza Mexico in Southern California embodies a unique case of invention and commodification of traditions for locally-bound immigrants and US citizens of Mexican descent, showing the force of the contemporary processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorilisation of identities and the recreations of imagined conceptions of homeland. The Plaza is a unique architectural recreation of Mex…
Where Memory DwellsCulture and State Violence in Chile: Culture and state violence in Chile
Ice and Political Heat: Cultural Memory Mediates the Past 2. Searching for Villa Grimaldi: Memory's Democratic Promise 3. Making Torture Visible: The Art of Guillermo Nunez in Chile's Transition 4. Documenting Absence: Ghostly Screens Unsettle the Past 5. Doubling 9/11: Exile Culture and Activism Conclusion: Rivers of Memory Notes Bibliography Index
Transnational meanings of La Virgen de Guadalupe: Religiosity, space and culture at Plaza Mexico
In this paper, we examine Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, California, a magnet for Latino communities from throughout the greater Los Angeles region, to show immigrants' use of space to produce transnational communities as coherent. One of the key ways that immigrant identity is formed in this space is through cultural religiosity. Despite the fact that Plaza Mexico is a shopping mall, the place gathers participation from Mexican immigrants and Latinos …
Toward a Sociology of the Trace
Visual Testimonies of Atrocity: Archives of Political Violence in Chile and Guatemala
In the aftermath of political violence in Latin America, the testimonial emerged as an important document of witness regarding the atrocities that had been committed in the region. In many cases, testimonies stood in for the absence of evidence, whereby archives of witness had been destroyed, hidden, or otherwise disappeared from public record. In this essay, the author analyzes forms of visual evidence in Guatemala and Chile, such as documentary…
Prologue: Traces in the Social World
Witness Citizenship: The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory
The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state-making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorializa…
Andean Translations: New Age Tourism and Cultural Exchange in the Sacred Valley, Peru
Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, Peru's tourist industry has been organized around an obsession with the Incan past. One rapidly growing segment of the industry aims to allow tourists to experience the Q'ero mysticism of the highlands in a somewhat "authentic" context. A case study of a center of this spiritual tourism in the Sacred Valley of the Incas that focuses on the transmission of energy healing rites raises questions abo…
Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly
With the 2012 ASA convention in Puerto Rico, "Dimensions of Empire and Resistance" as impetus, and the questions of coloniality and empire raised there fresh in our minds, this special issue of American Quarterly brings together research that rethinks the meaning of American studies from Latin American and Latinx studies. The issue calls attention to the historical complexities of colonial encounters and the making of liberal human rights regimes…
Inverted Visuality: Against the Flow of Extractivism
Mapuche Mnemonics
This essay addresses how indigenous memory haunts the Chilean nation as a past-present index of unaccounted-for discursive and material violence. This extends far beyond the forty-year window of memories about state terror and leftist "dissident" activity, although as many labor historians have documented, the twentieth century has been filled with antilabor massacres. The term past-present indexes the continuum of colonization within a web of ex…
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives
In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gómez-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 Gómez-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…
How to Block the Extractive View
Research Article| October 01 2018 How to Block the Extractive View Macarena Gómez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris is chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and director of the Global South Center. She is the author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, which theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous …
A dialogue on The Extractive Zone: Resistant sensoriums
Coloniality and Islands
The Occupied Forest
Macarena Gómez-Barris looks at the work of Francisco Huichaqueo and of Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, identifying their potential to resist extractivist capitalism through alternative representations of the forest
Decolonial Gestures: Anarcho-Feminist Indigenous Critique
Submerged perspectives: The arts of land and water defense
It is through specific genealogies of scholarship on race and coloniality, Indigenous feminisms, and Black feminisms that we can escape the well-rehearsed trope of ‘land as body’. Within a comparative hemispheric American studies framework, I consider the centre of struggles over empire and extractivism that show the unravelling of the binary between embodiment and territories. I also consider submerged perspectives and forms of solidarity by tho…
Extractivisme énergétique: Entretien avec Macarena Gómez-Barris
Sarah Claire : En guise d’introduction, présentez-nous votre carrière intellectuelle. Comment en êtes-vous arrivée à vous intéresser aux logiques extractivistes des systèmes coloniaux en Amérique latine? Macarena Gómez-Barris : Je suis originaire du Chili et j’en suis partie en tant qu’exilée politique avec ma famille en 1973, peu après le coup d’État militaire. Ma mère a participé à diverses actions politiques et a travaillé pour le régime socia…
Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory
In their interview, scholar and writer Macarena Gómez-Barris and artist and performer Sebastián Calfuqueo discuss the role of art, mediation, and coloniality with respect to Indigenous majority spaces and trans embodiment. Calfuqueo's body of work, like Gómez-Barris's scholarship, addresses the colonial and neocolonial processes of extraction, dispossession, and how Mapuche peoples in the southern territories of Chile and the global South continu…
Sociality at the End of the World
This collectively written essay meditates on sociality, mediation, death, and life during Pandemic 2020
Energy States
This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that ref…
At the Razor's Edge of Democracy
Dissolving into the surf
In this short piece I think about the ocean as queer and its liberating sensualities as a practice of writing into the surf. What are the dissolutions that emerge from the wetness of the sea? This piece is based on forthcoming work where I expand upon the themes of queer and trans ecologies at the sea's edge
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works)