Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial

by Laura E. Pérez

In Eros Ideologies Laura E. Pérez explores the decolonial through Western and non-Western thought concerning personal and social well-being. Drawing upon Jungian, people-of-color, and spiritual psychology alongside non-Western spiritual philosophies of the interdependence of all life-forms, she writes of the decolonial as an ongoing project rooted in love as an ideology to frame respectful coexistence of social and cultural diversity. In readings of art that includes self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez, the drawings and paintings of Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, and Favianna Rodriguez's screen-printed images, Pérez identifies art as one of the most valuable laboratories for creating, imagining, and experiencing new forms of decolonial thought. Such art expresses what Pérez calls eros understandings of social and natural reality that foreground the centrality of respect and care of self and others as the basis for a more democratic and responsible present and future. Employing a range of writing styles and voices—from the poetic to the scholarly—Pérez shows how art can point to more just and loving ways of being.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published October 11, 2019

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like the concept of the book and there’s nothing I disagree with. Perez embraces Lourdes Eros and uses art as vehicle to explore this nexus of spirituality and power. It’s not necessarily an archive I’m interested in and I feel like I have other thinkers in the field who I will probably turn to first.

[philosophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why "must" we think in either/or? Why not being as ellipses, as points of suspension, as markers of the unfinished or inarticulate ending of the plot in the making that is our individual lives and our social lives together as national and global communities?