Eli Bartra is a feminist scholar who addresses folk art and gender issues rarely studied in academia. In her introduction, she discusses women and folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, which often share the common fate of being disrespected by those who study in this region. Bartra’s anthology aims to begin correcting this situation.
Eli Bartra includes several authors outside the North American academy. She privileges Latina voices, tempering the prevalent Eurocentric tone found in much of the book. The collection includes ten studies of the visual folk arts in seven different Latin American and Caribbean countries. Each essay focuses on different ethnic groups and different regions such as Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Mexico.
Eli Bartra selects the texts for their effectiveness in providing and developing interesting comparative perspectives. For instance, readers can understand the similarities and differences between indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and the mestiza potters of Mexico and Colombia in articles written by Dorothea Scott Whitten, Ronald J. Duncan, Eli Bartra, and Betty LaDuke. These articles show that even though creative and technical processes are remarkably similar, the function of ceramics and the meaning of design and iconography vary widely from place to place.
The anthology includes five articles written by Anglos and five by Latin American and Caribbean scholars. It shows how the creative process is shaped by geographical, linguistic, ethnic, social, political, and economic factors. For example, Sally Price’s article on the Maroon women of Suriname speaks deeply of culture. The articles by Eli Bartra, Dolores Juliano, María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow, Norma Valle, and Lourdes Rejón Patrón are studies of communities with strong connections to the scholars who wrote them. Betty LaDuke, an artist-academic who has spent a great deal of time immersing herself in artists’ communities in Latin America and Africa, focuses on questions of gender in her essay.
The essays in this anthology acknowledge the elements of change and community inherent in folk art in the regions. All the authors in the anthology take note, in particular, of responsiveness to change. This anthology, approaching different cultural traditions from a variety of perspectives, strives to develop a clear, systematic framework for understanding exactly what women folk artists create and how they go about doing it.
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[Review length: 375 words • Review posted on February 15, 2007]