Visionary Art of the Americas

Native and introduced hallucinogens channel hemispheric tensions between European, pre-Columbian, Black, and Indigenous values. This book explores those encounters by analyzing their depictions in media, arguing that artists used their mixed heritage to navigate porous boundaries ranging from consumer culture to political dissent.

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Unlike their European predecessors in the experimentation with hallucinogens and aesthetics, many Latin American and North American authors turned to hallucinatory practices and substances as elements of their own hemispheric heritage. The twentieth-century narratives analyzed in Visionary Art of the Americas: Hemispheric Transculturations, Hallucinogens, Politics, Aesthetics and Mass Consumer Culture in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia only acquire their true depth once viewed within a much wider realm of visionary traditions ranging from non-Western sources in both the Orient and Africa to traditions in the Americas. Socially and culturally marginalized alongside their users, hallucinogens—simultaneously a colonial anathema and a sacred pre-Columbian ritual—have gained increasingly mainstream acceptance and support. The variety of films and texts analyzed in this book attest to the true heterogeneity of hallucinogenic experience in the Americas; scholarly attention to hallucinogens as the ultimate expression of organic intelligence is more important than ever.