Several years ago, when Peter Wade and I were discussing the best approach to anti-racist discourses and practices in Latin America, we mapped out many different possibilities. We talked about what would make the most sense, what would be the most accessible fields, and what would be most feasible and fundable. We considered researching the media, social movements and activism, the legal field, governmental initiatives, and culture, art and artistic representations. We could have included social media and the psychological, wellness and beauty industries, alongside the emotional dimensions of racism. I would nowadays also be thinking about the anti-racist opportunities within health constraints and outcomes – not to mention AI.
At that time, we decided to begin with what squarely sat within the social sciences: social movements, activism and some aspects of the efforts to legalise racial discrimination, with a focus on the struggles and initiatives in Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. We developed a research project, Latin American Antiracism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age, published several pieces documenting the turn to anti-racism in the region – such as the edited volume Against Racism (Pittsburgh University Press, 2022) – and put forward our arguments on what we called the alternative grammars of anti-racism and on the profound intersectional analytical needs of the field – particularly given the logics of mestizaje – while not claiming any sort of exceptionalism.
Having taken that journey, I am so excited to see in this book the results of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), for which I was invited to act as the international adviser – and of which I became an extreme fan, following with great interest the project’s aims to explore the ‘anti-racist effects of different artistic media – theatre, dance, visual art – with a focus on the emotional affordances and affective intensities that these media generate’.
The CARLA project was profoundly shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout nearly all the process, we could not meet, travel to see the contexts of production and meaning-making or get a glimpse of the audiences. The lockdowns we were all thrown into put a severe strain on the project, and the team, like many others around the world, had to resort to online alternatives.
Another major challenge – one that perhaps would have emerged regardless of whether the team had been able to meet in Argentina, Colombia or Brazil – was how to work between the artist’s intention and worldview and the social implications of art and representation. This was a difficult question that pushed the team to grapple with an elusive and empirically challenging issue: the emotional life of art. The book offers insights around how to think about artistic intent: the creative forces, fuelled by love and rage, that drive artists to denounce, propose, sing out loud, bare their souls in theatrical plays and performances, vibrate with the visual renditions of animations and paintings, and dance with kind, strong, wilful steps.
When the whole project team finally met in person in April 2022, after many months of only online meetings, the energy was amazing – everyone was ready. I was so grateful to have been invited to witness, remember and experience what art can do, be it for a single person or a collective. Art can make a piece of legislation resonate more deeply, it can bind together a social movement, it can stick us to each other and remind us why we struggle – to completely eradicate the idea that some people are worth more than others, and to assert that dignity should belong to all, not as a limited good but as an unquestionable principle.
Open access