The University of Arizona Press
Resisting Dispossession
Embodied Aesthetics in the Southwest
Illuminating the impacts of ongoing dispossession across the modern American Southwest
Resisting Dispossession examines how Native/Indigenous, Chicana/o/x, and Black communities in the American Southwest have confronted displacement and dispossession from the nineteenth century to the present. Moving beyond abstract theory, Karen R. Roybal centers cultural expression and embodied knowledge, revealing how colonialism, preservation, urban renewal, and gentrification continue to shape relationships to land, place, and belonging.
Drawing on Indigenous, Chicana feminist, and Black epistemologies, Roybal explores a diverse cultural archive of photographs, literature, musical compositions, oral histories, and storytelling practices. Through analyses of figures such as Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Raven Chacon, and Louis Carlos Bernal, alongside the stories of Chicana land grant heirs in New Mexico and southern Colorado, she demonstrates how artistic and cultural expression becomes a powerful tool for resisting erasure and reclaiming presence. Contesting representations of the Southwest made popular by figures like Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe, these works preserve alternative histories, challenge dominant narratives, and illuminate the ongoing impacts of dispossession across the region.
Interdisciplinary in scope, this work offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of aesthetics, embodiment, and power in the West and Southwest.
“Karen R. Roybal draws from visual culture, oral histories, and literature to demonstrate how Indigenous, Chicanx, and Black communities, over time, have resisted dominant narratives and impositions. Drawing from multiple regions and cultural expressions, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in studying the American Southwest and those who have long called this region home.”—Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, co-editor of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts
“This is a significant contribution to the discussion of Southwest literature and art and extends the author’s observations from Archives of Dispossession into the visual and the modern and contemporary periods. Twentieth-century Southwest art, Roybal shows, perpetuates ‘cycles of dispossession’ that modern and contemporary Native/Indigenous and Chicana/o storytellers and artists respond to and resist in complex and multilayered ways. Roybal’s constellation of texts brings a new perspective of Southwest art within the context of critical ethnic and settler colonial studies.”—Melina V. Vizcaíno-Alemán, author of Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature: Critical Regionalism and the Mexican American Southwest
