Abstract
This chapter contends that the principles assumed to have guided avant-garde artistic projects from the so-called historical to the neo-avant-gardes-the desire for modernity, the aspiration to revolutionize art and society through aesthetic experimentation-are in every case insufficient to describe and articulate a conceptual understanding of avant-gardism in the context of Latin American cultural history. Artistic movements that devised visual and literary language to resist, denounce, and undermine dictatorial regimes considered themselves or were conceived as vanguardias. Latin American post-1950s vanguardias can neither be paired with any of the guiding principles mentioned above nor with celebrated neo-avant-gardes of the European and North American context. Instead, they contested the violent deployment of exclusionary forms of modernization, which retrospectively raises important questions that redefine both historical and neo-avant-gardes as currents that emerge at points in which mapping and disarticulating the modern-colonial project feels particularly urgent. From this viewpoint, the chapter offers a perspective on the historical and neo-avant-garde waves that is open to current resonances and aesthetic explorations, as they advance major shifts in sensibility such as the appearance of subaltern voices and the problematization of gender categories among other cultural and political transformations.