Visionary Art of the Americas

Unlike their European predecessors, many Latin American and North American authors turned to hallucinatory 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 acquire their true depth only within a much wider realm of visionary traditions spanning Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Socially and culturally marginalized alongside users, hallucinogens—simultaneously a colonial anathema and a sacred pre-Columbian ritual—have gained increased mainstream acceptance. The various films and texts analyzed in this book attest to the true heterogeneity of hallucinogenic experience in the Americas at a time when scholarly attention to hallucination and visions as a survival adaptation of organic intelligence is crucial to understand its differences from A.I.