Visionary Art of the Americas

Few authors manage to untangle the cultural and political intricacies of hallucinogen use in the long term as skillfully as Juan David Cadena does here. Magnificently written and carefully argued, Visionary Art of the Americas uses transnational history to decenter the study of stimulants consumption from the mainstream narratives crafted in the 1960s. Cadena convincingly shows that the analysis of psychoactive substances across the Americas should go beyond the well-known histories of cartels and violence, highlighting the cultural and aesthetics dimensions of visionary knowledge.

For Cadena Botero, the hemispheric tradition of countercultures is found in hallucinogenic experimentation, a transversal way of exercising criticism. This book illuminates specific cases of artists from Colombia, Mexico, and the United States and their relationship with consumption and the criticism of capitalism. An extraordinary aesthetic and cultural history to see how, in the second half of the 20th century, certain aesthetic forms were immersed in transcultural experiences (class, ethnicities, languages) through the creation of visionary art.

Navigating the estuaries where the streams of psychedelic countercultures meet the ocean of hallucinogenic traditions, Juan David Cadena Botero's book reveals the crucial but unrecognized role that visionary knowledges and practices played in everyday living and worldviews, fine arts and pop cultures, and political and social movements across the continent in the 20th century. In its pages, the flight of the shaman, the trance of the mystic, the chant of the healer transmutes into the awe of the poet, the illumination of the artist, the utopia of the rebel and become indistinguishable. An inspired work of aesthetic analysis and cultural history, a must-read!

This book offers us a brilliant, engaging, thoughtful, and extensive exploration, with encyclopedic documentation, of the eventful historical convergence between indigenous Latin American thought based on communication with visionary power plants and Anglo-American psychedelic counterculture in the second half of the twentieth century. More than influences, transculturation, or syntheses, this grand cultural fresco of our recent past traces complex heterogeneous mixtures of ancestral and modern trends confronting each other in the decolonizing drama of the present.