The first epigraph above is the concluding sentence of "Borges and I." The writer of that story takes to task the Latin root of text which means "to weave." For as the author spins his polysemic web through the voices of first, second and third persons, a subtle and vertiginous realization arises in the reader that these characters are all Borges himself: the weaver of a kaleidoscopic narrative and the narrator who is not only fond of "hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and Robert Louis Stevenson's prose," but through such reflexive ruminations realizes that "[Borges ] shares those preferences [too], but with the vanity that turns them into the attributes of an actor."

When I was initially approached to edit an issue on Latin American art for Part, my eagerness soon gave way to an awareness of a conundrum akin to the mise-en-abyme within Borges' labyrinthine tale. It became apparent that in a study of Latin American art each countryunder that rubric beckons and challenges the critic, curator and historian for its own particular attention. Consequently without a closer and differentiated focus on individual countries, the propensity to gloss over specificities is more than a historiographical problem but is tantamount to a ventriloquistic exercise of Borgesean proportions. Voices become muddled, filtered and echoed through the dense web of histories that are ancient and modern, at once Old World and New World, cosmopolitan and regional, and resulting in what Nestor Garcia Canclini has called "multitemporal heterogeneities." The absence of specificity is a professional and disciplinary concern but it is also fraught with political fallout that marked previous exhibition surveys of Latin American art.

These exhibitions have already been the subject of extensive critical analyses in a variety of theoretical and/or curatorial contexts, thus there is no need to rehash what has already been articulated. What galvanized such salient observations about these exhibitions nonetheless remains a problematic that one is always conscious of in the curatorship, criticism and study of Latin American art and visual culture in the present historical moment. The most pressing of these questions is essentialism, which is not only a vestige from the colonial with reverberations into the neocolonial, but it continues to manifest itself in a variety of contemporary guises. This is evident in the frameworks of curators, critics and historians who situate certain strains of Latin American art as too anchored in a regional vernacular and thus not (post) modern enough. Or on the other hand, is the reactive response to aesthetic practices that engage formal modes, strategies and themes outside of registers prescribed by nationalist artistic tendencies. More recently, globalization and culture's privatization and their counterparts in the communications explosion coupled with its pretenses to accessibility and democratization have, for good or for bad, altered geographical, social and cultural localities into a presumed heterogeneous and heteroglossic pluritopia.

Not only are these issues an indirect influence on and point of contention of recent writing on Latin American art, but they are also what one finds within and around the theoretical contours of art history. This is especially apparent in how the discipline has continuously been configured and theorized at the end of this century. Such considerations are noticeable in the debates about the subject and object of art history. Related to these questions but from a more reflexive point of view have been the social production and location of art historical writing and meaning. And what about the art historical viability of methodological incursions from other disciplines such as anthropology, literary theory and to the more recent inquiry of cultural studies?

These questions are compounded and amplified when applied to Latin American models. The reason being is that these models are refracted through social prisms constituted from individual and collective histories that are historically and culturally disparate. The only non-stereotypical generalization about Latin American art theories, practices and histories would be of their heterogeneities, specifcities, and ex-centric drives that seek a manifold dissemination. What is germane to them are their attempts to dislodge themselves from the seemingly perpetual center/periphery equation, while at the same time crossing those literal and metaphorical borders that keep them confined within models that sustain differential relationships with dominant centers and circuits of artistic production. The essays below are wide in scope and seek to cross such borders.

O. Hugo Benavides' contribution investigates colonial reception and suppression of an early instance of prehispanic homosexual identity. His paper foregrounds that the political subjugation of one culture by another is also an epistemic one enunciated through discursive practices, and that the formation of identity is contingent and mediated by a variety of factors subsequently configuring it more as an effect rather than something stable, fixed and determined. Benavides' main disciplinary focus is cultural anthropology and offers a close reading of early colonial primary sources that concerns itself with the social reverberations of an aesthetics of performativity rather than the art object per se. Rocio Aranda-Alvarado's paper also negotiates the collision between the Old and New World. Her trajectory is via the agency of the racialized body and its articulation in modernist aesthetics exemplified in the work of Carlos Enriquez, a Cuban artist active within the milieu of the European avant-garde. For Aranda-Alvarado, the vocabularies of modernist abstraction become a locus of contestation between a peripheral avant-garde that seeks to reposition itself to the center, as the periphery's modes of (self) representation are co-opted, decontextualized and primitivized by the center as a reflection of its own vanguardism. Lisa Schiff's essay on Vik Muniz also sets up a theoretical tension; here it is between painting and photography, and the epistemology and social dimension of the photograph and its materiality and photographic tropes that constitute it as an ontological operation unto itself. This dialectic as an either/or dichotomy, moreover, she rightly concludes as presumptuous in the face of exploding technologies indicative of our hyper-information and simulacral age where the referent can collapse into the signifier. Whereas other scholars have approached Muniz's work through a social historical framework, Schiff's analysis is a welcome one that problematizes the privileging of that framework at the expense of its formalist other. Michelle Faguet's essay also operates in dialectic. The registers she attends to, however, are between text/image via her investigation of Julian Del Casal and Gustave Moreau. Casal was a fin-de-siecle Cuban poet whose relationship with Moreau was through Casal’ s literary and ekphrastic readings of Moreau's paintings. Faguet highlights this interaction as a gestation of a transatlantic modernity while raising two interesting issues through which other concerns are interwoven: the first is the relationship between the pictorial and the textual, and the second between center and periphery. The conjunction of these essays regardless of their themes and methodologies is that they situate art and visual culture from Latin America either historically or contemporaneously, as being in perpetual negotiation, process and engagement both autochthonously and with their transcontinental counterparts.

Thus as we cross into the second millennium, the imperative is to construct dialogical frameworks on Latin American art. The byproduct of these frameworks is that they will motivate a critical revision of the past and a circumvention of center/periphery relationships that continue to mark the present historical moment. What is needed are new modalities of thinking and positionalities of being that will result in what Homi Bhabha has termed in a different, but related context as the interstitial or Third Space. Or in a paraphrase of the second epigraph quoted above, to configure a social imaginary and globality whose centers are everywhere and peripheries nowhere. With such intentions, then, I hope that this compilation of essays and projects is an addition to the field of Latin American art history and visual/cultural studies and an apt introduction of diverse subject matter to the eclectic readership of Part.