ABSTRACT
TOWARD AN INDIGENOUS3 AESTHETICS The theoretical concerns about the political in the poetic and the poetic in the political which emerge in the 1984 cinema seminar at Havana are not novel to Latin American aesthetics. The call for liberating the imagination has formed a core project for cultural producers in the continent for over a quarter of a century. An entire generation of poets and novelists incorporated indigenous conceptualizations of reality, embraced the ‘marvelous real’ and in so doing, brought to the foreground the continent’s distance from ‘Western’ European aesthetics. A genre which came to be known as ‘magic realism’ articulated precisely a native Latin American and non-‘Western’ vision of the relation between art, politics, and reality. The practitioners working within this tradition infused cultural practices and forms with autochthonous world views thereby calling into question ‘Western’ dichotomization of art and life and rupturing hegemonic/dominant reason which is separated from the imaginary. Like poetry and narrative, new cinema severed with European culture as well.4
