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The term “landscape” comes from the German word “landschaft;” land meaning natural territory and schaft refering to human-modified space. By the sixteenth century, landscape visually articulated global territories. In other words, for more than five centuries, images have aided in the delineation of lands as possession, as resource, and as manifest destiny. Landscapes established topographic methods to visualize newly conquered territories, such as the Americas. With the advent of art academies in the Americas in the eighteenth-century, European tactics and aesthetics were put forward to shape and define empires in the Americas. Within these institutions and systems, landscape was engaged in the creation of a taxonomy of Latin America, its communities and cultures. Later, landscape was utilized as a genre to define newly born nations.

With the intent of innovating decolonial analytical frameworks that re-define Colonial America this panel examines the tradition of landscapes between 1521 and 1921. The role of landscapes to/in Colonial America is of primary focus. The picturesque, the pastoral, and the sublime are artistic tools used to describe the poetics of nature. How these, and other, conventions affirm, subjugate, and transform through landscapes are also of interest. Additional points of investigation include, but are not limited to, examinations of how landscapes redefine to fit local tastes and hegemonic necessities and consideration of the importance landscape images have on the political status of the various communities they represent and/or erase?