Introduction

This book emerges from a conviction shared among the contributors that art can play a key role in challenging racism. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the arts have long served as important tools of protest, solidarity and education to challenge racism. Nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry and early-twentieth-century Brazilian capoeira are two examples.Footnote ¹ In Brazil, Abdias do Nascimento’s Teatro Experimental do Negro (1940s–1960s) was a powerful voice against anti-Black racism, while Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed also addressed racism. In Chile, Víctor Jara used theatre and, more famously, music to challenge oppressions, including racism against Indigenous people. Performance and music combine in the 1970s’ phenomenon known as Black Rio (Steinitz Reference Steinitz2025; Treece Reference Treece2022) and in the expressions of Brazilian carnival groups such as Filhos de Gandhy (founded 1949) and Ilê Aiyê (founded 1974), all of which challenged anti-Black racism, albeit in different ways. More recently, hip-hop has provided a fertile field for anti-racist sentiment, from the Southern Cone to Mexico and into Latin American spaces in the US (Dennis Reference Dennis2014; Fernandes Reference Fernandes2011; Reiter and Mitchell Reference Reiter and Mitchell2008). Artists working with diverse visual media have used their practices to challenge racism, as this book shows for Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, and as other scholars have documented for countries such as Mexico (Ortega Domínguez and Abel Reference Ortega Domínguez, Abel and Ezcurra2023) and Cuba (de la Fuente Reference de la Fuente2008).

Employing narrative and non-narrative techniques, the arts have the ability to engage people, mobilising concepts and meanings with an emotional and affective intensity, which makes art practices well suited to deal with racism’s visceral dimensions and emotive logics. This is important because there is a mismatch between, on the one hand, the affective traction of racism and ideas about racialised difference and, on the other, the reasoned argument of much anti-racist policy and discourse. The logical statement that ‘race is a social construction with no biological reality’ has proven a weak anti-racist strategy. The formulation only hints at the power of social constructions as structuring forces in society; hence it only hints at the size and complexity of the task of changing structural inequalities. A related problem is that the formulation provides little leverage with which to address the fact that social constructions get deep into the psyche (Moore Reference Moore2007), as well as the material human body (Hartigan Reference Hartigan2013; Wade Reference Wade2002), where they tap into emotions and affective intensities.

One productive way into the realm where concepts and meanings are powerfully charged with embodied sentiments and sensibilities is via literary, artistic and performative practices, whether textual or ‘beyond text’ (Cox, Irving and Wright Reference Cox, Irving and Wright2016). These practices, while working through representational narrative and discourse, also engage – and potentially transform – the receiver affectively. Due to their dual capacity for generating representational and affective traction, artistic interventions are often identified as having particular creative potential in the political and civic domains (Beasley-Murray Reference Beasley-Murray2010; Flynn and Tinius Reference Flynn and Tinius2015; Moya Reference Moya2016; Sommer Reference Sommer2014, Reference Sommer, de la Fuente and Andrews2018, Reference Sommer2006b; Thompson Reference Thompson2014). The arts narrate stories and convey symbolic meanings through images, actions and words, and, in the process, mobilise emotions and affective responses that have effects that also go below the radar of discursive meaning. This makes them able to engage with racism’s emotional logic and affective power – although art is always open to interpretation and its affective traction can also be deployed to other ends (see Chapter 7). While social policies addressing socio-economic conditions are vital to correcting racial inequalities, they may fail to address the powerful emotions – positive and negative – associated with racial differences in a highly racialised and unequal society.

Today there is a widespread climate characterised by the coexistence of, on the one hand, persistent denials of racism, or claims that it has been superseded by post-raciality, alongside, on the other hand, equally persistent and even increasing racial inequality, plus the resurgence of right-wing and populist movements, some of which have become more overtly racist over time (Gilroy Reference Gilroy2000; Goldberg Reference Goldberg2008; Hooker Reference Hooker2020; Lentin Reference Lentin2011, Reference Lentin2014). In this context, analyzing how artistic interventions can work against racism in its multiple dimensions becomes particularly relevant.

Our book contributes to this field by exploring in detail how artistic practices work in anti-racist ways in Latin American societies – more precisely, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. We hope this will support anti-racist agendas in important ways, as well as contributing to scholarship on racism and anti-racism. Latin America is a particularly interesting region to explore these questions and perhaps learn some lessons that go beyond its borders. The region has a long history in which marked racial inequality has taken a particular form, shaped by low levels of racial segregation, the coincidence of class and racial hierarchies, and above all the hegemony of ideas about national projects of inclusion based on biocultural processes of racial mixture – mestizaje in Spanish, mestiçagem in Portuguese (Moreno Figueroa and Wade Reference Moreno Figueroa and Wade2022; Telles Reference Telles2004; Telles and Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America Reference Telles2014; Wade Reference Wade2010b). In varied ways across the region, the social and institutional recognition in colonial times of mixture and mixed people as constituting a social field different from Black, Indigenous and white people became, in the nineteenth century, a powerful ideology of nationhood (albeit more so in some countries, such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, than in others such as Argentina and Chile). The idea of mestizaje could be deployed against European scientific racist theories about mixture as degeneration, serving to make an authentic national virtue out of the unavoidable reality of racially mixed populations. Despite this, mixture as a process and mestizos as a category continued to be structured by racialised hierarchies with colonial roots and global reach, which gave high value to whiteness as a physical and moral status; hegemonic ideologies of mixture construed it as a process that would whiten and mejorar la raza (improve the race) of the nation’s people (Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt Reference Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt2003; Stepan Reference Stepan1991).

The ideology of mestizaje has facilitated the denial or minimisation of racism and racial inequality – based on the claim that a society in which everyone is mixed cannot be racist – while powerful racist attitudes that privilege whiteness over darkness can hide in plain sight. The coexistence of a discourse of post-raciality (characterised by the use of denial, minimisation, delegitimation and gaslighting in relation to race and racism) with persistent and even increasing racism is a combination that has recently been identified for many parts of the world (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2015; Lentin Reference Lentin2016). But in Latin America, it has a very long history that goes back to at least the late nineteenth century and continues today, alongside a widespread turn to multiculturalism from the 1990s and, from about 2000, a more tentative and uneven turn towards an explicit and official anti-racism (Hooker Reference Hooker2020; Martínez Novo and Shlossberg Reference Martínez Novo and Shlossberg2018; Moreno Figueroa and Wade Reference Moreno Figueroa and Wade2022). This forms the complex context for the artists with whom we worked in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA).Footnote ² (This context will be discussed in relation to Argentina, Brazil and Colombia later on.)

We think that, for scholars and especially for activists and others promoting anti-racist agendas, there are important ideas about anti-racism to be derived from working closely with Latin American artists and observing how, through their artistic practices, they choose to address race and challenge racial inequality and racism in ways attuned to the particularities of Latin American racial formations. In this respect, a key theme that emerged during CARLA was the limitations of a narrow view of the impact of racism, as affecting only people seen as Black and Indigenous, albeit they are the most obvious concern given the violence of the racism they experience. In Latin American societies, the tendency for class and racial hierarchies to coincide and be mutually constitutive facilitates open agendas of social justice (Lehmann Reference Lehmann2022) that can forge alliances between Black and Indigenous movements and, crucially, can open up the question of the role in anti-racism of mestizo (mixed-race) people, who also suffer the effects of racism – although they may perpetrate it too. A related aspect of a more open approach to racism is that the familiar focus on Black and Indigenous activist movements is broadened to include mestizo and ‘brown’ anti-racism, which incidentally may help to contend with the difficulties around the reification that often accompany identity-based movements – and which have been fomented by official multiculturalism. The art practices that feature in this book include examples of this kind of inclusive anti-racism, which goes beyond identity politics and addresses social injustice more widely (see Chapters 3, 6 and 7, and Curated Conversation 3).

Also important is the way in which the artists with whom we collaborated questioned and broadened definitions of anti-racism (see the section on this later in the chapter). For example, when commissioned to produce an anti-racist piece, Brazilian Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa created a film about the monoculture of maize in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Monoculture (literal and symbolic), land invasion and Christian proselytism are among the most insidious racist practices identified by our Brazilian Indigenous collaborators, showing that anti-racism for them goes beyond the recognition of Indigenous identity as being the key goal: at play are wider agendas of social justice linked to multiple differences.Footnote ³

As noted, the way mestizaje has shaped Latin American racial orders raises the question of the role of mestizo people in anti-racist struggle (Carlos Fregoso Reference Carlos Fregoso2024; Correa Angulo Reference Correa Angulo2024). There is a significant difference between mestizo allyship and white allyship. If we consider Margarita Ariza, a Colombian artist with whom we worked (see Chapter 3), it is clear that she does not claim to be Black or Indigenous nor is she identified by others as such. Yet an important part of her anti-racist art work – specifically the work Blanco porcelana (Porcelain White) – focuses on the fact that, although she might be seen by many Colombians as white, she was considered by some of her own family members to be not quite white enough.Footnote ⁴ With respect to anti-racist work, her persistent labelling as morena (brown, brunette) by family members gives her a positionality different from that of someone who is identified and who identifies as white. She has a specific personal stake in anti-racism because, like many other mestizos and morenos, she has felt, in the intimate circulations of emotion and affect, the effects of Latin-American-style racism (Hordge-Freeman Reference Hordge-Freeman2015; Moreno Figueroa Reference Moreno Figueroa2010) – while she could in principle also form part of the non-Black and non-Indigenous majority of Latin American people who reproduce, intentionally or otherwise, racialised inequalities, even if they are not explicitly and directly racist.

This positionality directs our attention again to a key theme of this book, which is the operations of racism beyond the processes that impact on Black and Indigenous peoples: the figure of the mestizo or brown person highlights racism as a pervasive force that needs to be tackled by people who occupy a wide array of positionalities affected by it in different ways. Of course, the often lethal impact of racism on Black and Indigenous people is of a different scale from that experienced by a middle-class mestizo woman such as Ariza. But the wider point is that to focus only on anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism risks obscuring how racism operates as a structurally pervasive presence – which may also target working-class brown people in very violent ways (Aguiló and Vivaldi Reference Aguiló and Vivaldi2023: 561; Ferrari Reference Ferrari2023), as highlighted by members of the Argentine art collective Identidad Marrón (literally, Brown Identity), with whom we worked.Footnote ⁵

Another key area that emerged from our work with Latin American artists centred on issues of visibility and visibilisation. National projects in the region have traditionally been based on ideals of racial mixture and whitening, resulting in racial formations characterised by the ambivalent recognition and denial of Blackness, Indigeneity and non-whiteness (Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt Reference Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt2003; Wade Reference Wade2010b). These elements – peoples, histories, cultures – were made invisible in some ways, but hypervisible in others. On the one hand, Blackness was, and often still is, denied and cast as ‘foreign’ in countries such as Mexico and Argentina; Black historical figures have been erased or whitened in many countries.Footnote ⁶ In the three countries where we worked and elsewhere, Indigeneity was, and often still is, cast as belonging to the past and in a process of decline or at best assimilation into a modernising nation. Blackness and Indigeneity have long been associated with low status and have functioned as a negative benchmark against which to judge ‘progress’, both national and individual, towards modernity and whiteness (Alberto Reference Alberto2022; Wade Reference Wade2023).

On the other hand, widespread and institutionalised indigenismo or indianismo carved out a special place for Indigeneity, albeit with a discourse that mainly used the past tense and the passive, primitivist voice; the same can be said for indigenismo/indianismo’s smaller and less widespread cousin, negrismo (see Chapters 1, 2 and 3).Footnote ⁷ In both cases, national projects included and valued a domesticated – and, importantly for our purposes, often aestheticised – form of non-whiteness for the aura of authenticity it lent to national identities that sought to distance themselves from Eurocentrism, but were nevertheless steeped in a modernist temporality of progress. The multicultural turn in Latin America simply added a new layer to this inclusion-plus-exclusion dynamic, rather than seriously changing the mould of the mestizaje project.

In a context in which erasure and invisibilisation are keenly felt, many Latin American artists seek to make Blackness and Indigeneity visible in ways that go beyond the confines of indigenismo and negrismo and their pigeon-holes of acceptable non-whiteness. But as national imaginaries based on mestizaje also involve processes of partial and conditional inclusion, in which a certain kind of visibility has long been present, strategies of visibilisation can risk being sidelined into pre-existing stereotyped pigeon-holes (see Chapter 7). Precisely because nationalist inclusion of non-whiteness has often taken an aestheticised form (Pinheiro Dias Reference Pinheiro Dias, Jens, Gabriel and Victoria2023), strategies of visibilisation that depend on aesthetic media have to work extra hard to break out of the confines of that inclusion; the aesthetic elements have to be carefully developed with close attention to their political implications.

Such dilemmas are present in many parts of the world but are perhaps particularly evident in Latin America, given the importance of the inclusion-plus-exclusion dynamic in the region. In the US and Europe, for example, Blackness (and other forms of non-whiteness) are more visible – as a clearly segregated element or as a ‘problem’ linked to the immigration of ‘foreigners’ – and less subject to incorporation as part of a putatively national culture of racial inclusion (Marx Reference Marx1998; Wade Reference Wade2015), notwithstanding their inclusion as culturally distinct components of a recently minted multicultural society. It is interesting, then, that the Afro-Colombian dancers with whom we worked (see Chapter 4) say that they ‘dance to be heard’, rather than dance to be seen. They are trying to find a pathway between the Charybdis of exclusion and invisibilisation and the Scylla of co-optative, conditional inclusion. The form taken by the Scylla in Latin America is particularly insidious and is an object lesson in the power of an inclusiveness that is real in part – as opposed to being mere rhetoric or illusion – but still functions to sustain racial inequality and make racism difficult to pinpoint.

In sum, then, we think that the material in this book makes some important contributions to what anti-racist activism and scholarship can learn from Latin American racial formations in terms of i) broadening definitions of anti-racism to include wider agendas of social justice; ii) addressing racism as a pervasive presence that implicates people who do not identify as Black or Indigenous, but also not as white, and who may be both victims and victimisers; and iii) managing the dilemmas created by the processes of inclusion-plus-exclusion, which are long-standing in the region and have become increasingly globalised. The fact that conditional inclusion in Latin America – and elsewhere – has tended to focus on aesthetic experiences (e.g. visual representations, music, dance, cuisine) makes the role of artists in challenging racism particularly important.

In what follows, we explore some key concepts – racism and anti-racism, art, politics and affect – before briefly outlining the racial formations of the three countries in question: Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. The Introduction ends with some reflections on the collaborative methods we have employed, followed by a brief outline of the chapters.

Racism

The concept of racism that underlies this book is broad and flexible. It goes beyond the common approach that sees racism as processes that exclude and stigmatise categories of people defined in terms of selected aspects of phenotype or ancestry or a combination of these elements – that is, in terms of biology or the physical body. On the other hand, it avoids the kind of ‘conceptual inflation’ identified by Robert Miles (Reference Miles1989: 50–61) in which an ever-increasing number of processes of category-based exclusions – for example, those driven by xenophobia, ethnocentrism and nationalism – are labelled racist. We understand racism to be processes of exclusion and stigmatisation directed at people identified on the basis of a flexible combination of perceptions of appearance, ancestry and behaviour. However, rather than including all such processes, which would spread the net too wide, we see racism as rooted in specific processes that first emerged historically in the conjunctures of conquest and enslavement that began in embryonic form with medieval Arab trading into sub-Saharan Africa. These processes took further shape in the fifteenth century with the culmination of the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula by Christians and the progressive exclusion of Jewish and Muslim people on the basis of their raza or sangre (blood, ancestry), understood as part of an embodied moral and religious propensity, not just a trait that we now might class as biological. And such processes were consolidated over several centuries from the conquest of the Americas by Europeans, begun by the Spanish in 1492, a period during which ideas about appearance, ancestry and behaviour were used in the domination of subaltern and enslaved populations, identified as indio/índio/Indian and negro/black, by people who increasingly identified as blanco/branco/white (Wade Reference Wade2015). Racism is inherently gendered and sexed because it refers to ideas about ancestry and inheritance, and thus also sexual reproduction and male–female relations (but also, by extension, non-heterosexual relations) (Wade Reference Wade2009b).

Racism has mutated over time, partly because it is a ‘scavenger ideology’ (Mosse Reference Mosse1985: 234) that picks up and seeps into diverse forms of categorisation and difference; partly too because of changes in ideas about and knowledge of the relationships between appearance, ancestry and behaviour; and partly because of changes in relationships between racialised categories of people. Thus, just as one example – but an important one – the rejection of biological determinism in relation to race that gathered force after World War II and the horrors of Nazi racial eugenics meant that the language of race-as-biology, which had become dominant in the West from about 1800, was seen by many as politically toxic. Although the term ‘racism’ is still commonly used everywhere to designate certain practices and processes deemed immoral and unjust, in some countries any use of the term or concept of ‘race’ became difficult; it was even banned from French legislative language in 2013. A tendency to use a language of culture to talk about differences has become very common (Stolcke Reference Stolcke1995), even in countries such as Britain and the USA, where it is still politically acceptable to use the word ‘race’, albeit popular usage may prefer ‘ethnicity’. This tendency has been labelled ‘cultural racism’, because it very often targets the differences and the categories previously referred to using the language of race. We are seeing here an inflexion of the relationships between appearance, ancestry and behaviour, in which behaviour (culture) takes on a primary role and ideas about appearance and ancestry may become tacit – although they never actually disappear and may be made explicit by some people (Wade Reference Wade2002, Reference Wade2017).

The important point is that we recognise that ‘race’ – and racism – are at issue not so much because of the overt discourse being used but rather because of the specific categories of people that are being targeted, which are the same categories as those constituted during centuries of colonial oppression. The history is what gives us the main clue, rather than the type of discourse. For our purposes, the implication is that the oppression of Indigenous peoples is very much based on ideas about racialised difference and thus unequivocally involves racism, contra ideas that, because differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are not always based on phenotype but also on language, dress, place of residence and so on, discrimination against them is classifiable as ethnic or cultural, not racial (see Chapter 2; see also Sá and Milanez Pereira Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020: 161; Wade Reference Wade2010b: 38).Footnote ⁸ In this book, we address racism as a set of processes that involves categories of people classed as Black, Indigenous, brown – and of course white.Footnote ⁹

Anti-Racism

As we have already intimated, actions may have anti-racist effects without the actors involved using the term ‘anti-racism’. Because we started our research by engaging with artists who appeared to us to be explicitly anti-racist, we ended up working with many people who did identify with that label, but some did not. Referring to Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell, Lúcia Sá and Felipe Milanez (Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020: 162) state that ‘neither Baniwa nor Esbell make direct use of the term racism in connection to their art’. Some artists have used terms such as ‘decolonisation’ and ‘decoloniality’ rather than anti-racism, foregrounding historical processes of oppression against their peoples. For example, the curation of museum and art gallery exhibitions undertaken by Brazilian Indigenous artists discussed in Chapter 5 was defined by them as decolonisation, while it was also carried out as an explicit collaboration with the project’s anti-racist remit. And, as we have said, some Indigenous artists in Brazil preferred to define anti-racism around questions of land and territory and the threat of ‘monocultures’, broadly conceived. (This approach perhaps decentres the tendency for the terms ‘anti-racism’ and ‘decoloniality’ to foreground the agency of the dominant actors, instead placing Indigenous concerns at the centre.)

But, of course, racism is a major component of the relations of coloniality that decolonial initiatives seek to unsettle and subvert (Lehmann Reference Lehmann2022; Quijano Reference Quijano1999). For this reason, perhaps, it is noticeable that the terms ‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’ are relatively commonly used among Indigenous activists – artists and otherwise – in Brazil compared to other areas of Latin America. For example, alongside noting that Baniwa and Esbell do not refer to ‘racism’, Sá and Milanez describe two meetings organised in 2018 with Indigenous intellectuals, community leaders, activists and students to discuss the topic of racism against Indigenous populations in Brazil, and observe that ‘no Indigenous participant in the two meetings had any reservations to refer to the violence, ill-treatment and invisibilisation of Amerindians in Brazil as racism’ (Sá and Milanez Pereira Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020: 163).Footnote ¹⁰

In contrast, for the female musicians who make up the Colombian group Las Emperadoras de la Champeta (see Chapter 1), the key issues of inequality and exclusion centre around gender and class and the marginalisation of champeta music, a genre associated with the working-class spaces of the port cities of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region. A review of the group’s YouTube channel reveals that the only reference to race and racism is in a video of a song, ‘Pará en la Raya’ (Holding the Line), written and performed especially for the CARLA project – and, even then, the reference is only via the posters adorning the studio walls and the video’s description, which both mention CARLA, while the lyrics refer to ‘abuse’ and ‘harassment’ of working-class women.Footnote ¹¹ However, working-class spaces in these cities are associated in the national imaginary with non-whiteness – Blackness, brownness, dark-skinned Indigenous-Black mestizos – while the music itself has unequivocally African origins, albeit of twentieth-century rather than colonial vintage, and is also strongly associated with Blackness (Cunin Reference Cunin2007; Montoya Alzate Reference Montoya Alzate2019; Streicker Reference Streicker1995; Wade Reference Wade2000). When the topic of racism is provided as a frame – for example, in the context of an interview with band leader Mily Iriarte, recorded for CARLA’s online exhibition after some twelve months’ collaborating with the project – then explicit links are easily made. Iriarte says:

The case of Las Emperadoras seems, on the face of it, different from that of Brazilian Indigenous artists. But there is a common theme of what Tathagatan Ravindran (Reference Ravindran2020: 976), describing Bolivia, calls ‘undecidability in racial discourses’, caused by the ‘constant alternation between multiple classificatory logics’ that is characteristic of Latin American racial formations with the shifting boundaries of their relational racialised categories. Undecidability means that the discourse of race and racism is absent and present at the same time (Wade Reference Wade2010a; Wade et al. Reference Wade, Deister, Kent, Sierra and del Castillo Hernández2014) and this is manifested, in slightly different ways, in the discourses of both Indigenous artists in Brazil and brown working-class women musicians in Colombia, all of whom may, and may not, talk explicitly about racism.Footnote ¹³ Even the ‘anti-racism with a class consciousness’ explicitly espoused by the Argentine collective Identidad Marrón, which focuses precisely on the coincidence of racial and class hierarchies, has to constantly battle with the undecidability generated by the fact that discourses of class are frequently used to distract attention from racial inequality (Aguiló and Vivaldi Reference Aguiló and Vivaldi2023).

At any rate, it seems clear – perhaps increasingly so in the incipient official turn to anti-racism of the last decade or so – that providing a safe space that explicitly invites people to frame their experiences of exclusion in terms of racism and anti-racism acts as a kind of release mechanism that gives voice to an underlying consciousness of racism that is still difficult to articulate in public forums and that is often subsumed into the experiences of class and gender inequality with which it is always deeply entwined (Wade and Moreno Figueroa Reference Wade and Moreno Figueroa2021). Indeed, we found that, as a result of engaging with our research, some artists involved in Afro dance in Colombia and in Indigenous and Afro theatre in Argentina began to adopt the label of anti-racism more explicitly as a way to frame their activities.

This is to say that our approach to defining what activities count as anti-racist is broad and flexible, in two ways. First, the terms ‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’ may or may not be explicitly used as badges or framing devices: we understand activities as anti-racist if there is some sense among the artists in question of the racialised character of the inequality and oppression being challenged, but this sense can be tacit and emergent.Footnote ¹⁴ Second, while conceptually we understand racism as a set of historically embedded structures that generate and reproduce racialised inequalities in the distribution of power and privilege – rather than simply being a matter of prejudiced individuals or the non-recognition of identity – we also recognise that such structures and actions are in a relationship of mutual constitution (Giddens Reference Giddens1984), as are structures of resource distribution and regimes of identity recognition (Fraser and Honneth Reference Fraser and Honneth2003). Therefore, anti-racist initiatives that explicitly target individual people’s attitudes and, for example, seek to expand their awareness are not to be discounted simply because they do not explicitly frame what they do as a challenge to racial capitalism, coloniality and other such structures. Equally, anti-racist activities that are aligned to capitalist markets can have valuable effects and should not be dismissed out of hand (Ruette-Orihuela et al. Reference Ruette-Orihuela, Vigoya, Ramírez-Torres, Valencia-Murraín and Lucumí-Mosquera2024). This is important in thinking about the effects that artists seek to produce – which often aim to provoke certain affective and cognitive reactions in their audiences, as well as challenging structures of power – and about how artists may have to make a living by engaging with the market and the state.

Art, Politics and Affect

What can art do in terms of challenging racism and fostering anti-racism? In one sense, it can operate in a number of overlapping modalities, such as: combating racist stereotypes and representations (see e.g. Chapters 4, 6 and 7); decolonising the art world by creating institutional spaces, networks and positions of power for Black, Indigenous and non-white people in that world, as practitioners, curators and cultural managers (see e.g. Chapter 5); working with marginalised communities through art practices to bring people together through engagement with art, affirm their presence, combat invisibility and silencing, strengthen identity, and support local struggles for justice and equality (see e.g. Chapters 6 and 7). Art can also be used to communicate and channel another entire ontology, that is, a way of being, living and feeling in the world. This mode focuses on challenging an entire system of interlocking oppressions and inequalities – such as racism, capitalism, sexism, heterosexism, anthropocentrism – to propose another way of being in the world, a way of being where racism and other oppressions do not make any sense. These different ontologies are often connected to non-white, non-capitalist and/or non-Christian belief systems with origins in Indigenous or African cultures (Pinheiro Dias Reference Pinheiro Dias2022). Although this is not something we directly address in this book, this modality was present in many of the artworks and interviews produced for the project. Examples appear in Denilson Baniwa’s film Colheita maldita (Accursed Harvest); in Ziel Karapató’s criticism of Christian conversion in his installation Prisão de almas (Prison of Souls), produced for the CARLA-sponsored exhibition Hãhãw: Arte indígena antirracista (Anti-Racist Indigenous Art) in Salvador, Bahia; and in the following statement by Daiara Tukano, who, although she publicly labels herself as an artist on her own website, also states: ‘I am not an art creator. I am not an artist. It is not about what I create, but how I relate to creation and let creation flow through me and how I can be a channel to something that is much bigger than me. So that’s a different relationship with the universe, with the cosmos.’Footnote ¹⁵

This rough typology cross-cuts what Paula Serafini (Reference Serafini2022: 25–28) identifies as the functions of art for social movements organising against relations of coloniality and associated practices of extractivism. She lists five functions:

1. (1) denunciation, which involves making people and their issues visible and affirming their legitimacy and relevance;

2. (2) documentation, which can be the literal creation of an archive, but may also entail the development of narratives that diverge from mainstream top-down developmentalism;

3. (3) democratisation, that is, the sharing of information and the building of community around alternative narratives;

4. (4) the deconstruction of dominant naturalised conceptual frames that depend, for example, on classic Western binaries such as culture/nature, mind/body, feeling/reason;

5. (5) design, which is the creation of new objects and new ways of being.

Serafini’s functions are useful to think with, but they tend to neglect the key theme of decolonising spaces of the art world; they are also rather abstract, whereas the three (or four) modes we have outlined here are easy to relate to concrete art practices.

Beyond these specific modalities and functions, there is the overarching question of what social change can be achieved by artistic practices. At a basic level, as Bernd Reiter (Reference Reiter2009: 158) notes, ‘Gaining a voice in the public sphere of a society where racism and exclusion have rendered whole groups of people invisible and labelled their cultural and artistic production unworthy of public display is therefore necessarily a highly political act’. Going deeper, Alejandro de la Fuente contends that ‘things that are not speakable in other realms become possible in the realm of art’ (Gates, Rodríguez Valdés and de la Fuente Reference Gates, Valdés and de la Fuente2012: 35). Foregrounding the complex relations between art and politics, Doris Sommer says that ‘cultural agency’ – as manifest in creative activities such as pedagogy, research, activism and the arts – creates ‘wiggle room,’ displaying a creative preference ‘for caginess over confrontation’ in the face of opponents’ greater power. Art can undermine univocality and single-mindedness (although it can also reinforce them) and provide a ‘dangerous supplement to systems that prefer to be left alone’ (Sommer Reference Sommer and Sommer2006a: 5, 13). Looking at socially engaged art projects initiated both by state politicians and by grassroots agents, Sommer finds that they can inspire faith in new possibilities for society, fostering ‘unbiased judgement’, ‘free thinking’ and the overriding of ‘predetermined conclusions about values and concepts, personal gain, party lines, or moral argument’ (Sommer Reference Sommer2014: 87–88). Art often achieves this in indirect ways: Afro-descendant writers in Latin America work ‘in restless toggling or counterpoint between two (sometimes more) antagonistic systems, without necessarily wanting to settle accounts or to claim that one side wins and the other loses’; they ‘remind us that creativity is more about endless and unresolved processes than about final pleasing products’ (Sommer Reference Sommer, de la Fuente and Andrews2018: 320).

Also observing the diverse possibilities afforded by the arts, Diana Boros differentiates ‘plastic’ art, which is conformist, mainstream and market-oriented, from ‘visionary’ art, which is transcendent and rebellious.Footnote ¹⁶ While all art has ‘positive societal value’, the repetitiveness, overproduction and profit-oriented character of plastic art means it loses its transformative power, whereas visionary art ‘encourages important political possibilities by reawakening (through [the] rearrangement [of life]) and engaging (through the critical thought that the rearrangement invites) a participant’ (Boros Reference Boros2012: 6). Although plastic art may foment a ‘sense of pride and interest in the public, which is vital to a sincere feeling of community’, only visionary art ‘encourages within people the expansion of their imaginative capabilities, their true independence (knowledge of self) and their sense of empathy’ (Boros Reference Boros2012: 15).

Haunting any optimistic assessment of the political effects of artistic practices is the fact that, while visual culture may be ‘a fertile ground for counter hegemonic exercises’, it is also ‘one of the fundamental resources for hegemony-building’ (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky, Alberto and Elena2016: 158). Obvious examples include the art promoted by Fascist and Stalinist regimes in the twentieth century. Art can also be harnessed to nationalist projects based on cultural homogenisation, racism and patriarchy. Jacques Rancière thought that art is inherently political because it creates a representation of a given social world and the people in it and establishes a normative framework for what can and cannot be shown and said about these things. In what he calls the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, also known as modern art, art becomes identical with all of life (i.e. is no longer located above large parts of it as a bourgeois elite phenomenon) and thus can undermine hierarchy through a politics of aesthetics, creating new communities and new social relations. In that sense, artistic egalitarianism is analogous to political egalitarianism. But this does not guarantee that all art is progressive, as the political context can allow for art to be used for regressive and progressive ends; or simply to be interpreted as either regressive or progressive. Rancière equivocates here between seeing art as having a progressive dimension (given by, for example, the fact that almost anyone can access and use language), and acknowledging that art can work in ways that are both progressive and non-progressive or political and apolitical: ‘The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2013: 19). This is important because the affordances of the various kinds of anti-racist art practices described in this book are often multidirectional and multivalent, especially as they circulate among audiences who may choose to read them against the grain of the artists’ intentions.

How does affect fit in here? As we have noted, the creative potential in the political and civic domains that is often attributed to artistic interventions is linked to their capacity for generating effects that are not only cognitive and representational but also emotional and affective (Beasley-Murray Reference Beasley-Murray2010; Flynn and Tinius Reference Flynn and Tinius2015; Moya Reference Moya2016; Sommer Reference Sommer2014, Reference Sommer, de la Fuente and Andrews2018, Reference Sommer2006b; Thompson Reference Thompson2014). In definitional mode and cutting through the diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas about what affect, emotions and feelings are and how they differ, we adopt a simple approach that sees feelings as personal/biographical, emotions as intersubjective social constructions and affect as an embodied reaction that adds experiential intensity to emotions and feelings (and thoughts) (Shouse Reference Shouse2005).

This does not imply that affect is inherently outside discourse and sociality, contra Brian Massumi and others.Footnote ¹⁷ As Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway1991) has argued, there can be no pre-social encounter with the body, biology or nature. In that sense, affect is, like emotion, intersubjectively constructed, even if it is not necessarily mediated by language itself. However, it remains useful to retain a heuristic distinction between the sociality of emotions and the embodied intensities of affective reactions. The distinction is important to understanding the impact of art, which mobilises symbolic discursive meanings and emotional reactions, but which also – in some forms more than others – has the power to produce bodily reactions that intensify the experience of those meanings and emotions.

For example, the experience of watching in person a performance of Sankofa Danzafro, the Afro-Colombian dance company with whom Carlos Correa worked, is different, in terms of intensity of embodied experience, from watching the performance on a mobile phone: the loudness of the music, the reverberation of the drums in the body, the close physicality of the dancers’ bodies – all these lend a heightened intensity to meanings and emotions. This is partly because, during weeks of rehearsal and collective reflection, the dancers have embodied their own experiences of being Black in Colombia and are using this affective intensity to ‘move’ each other and their audiences so as to transmit what racism feels like. This sharpens the emotions and meanings and helps generate what Correa calls an ‘anti-racist emotionality’, which provides tools for combating racism (see Chapter 4). The same applies to the theatre groups with whom Ana Vivaldi collaborated (see Chapter 6). The actors’ bodies materialise the histories of Afro-descendant and Mapuche people in Argentina and intensify the emotions around experiences of invisibilisation, exclusion and violence transmitted among the actors and to the audiences.

In sum, while it is clear that art can function to support regimes of power, we explore art in its potential to be ‘oppositional, subversive to power, to the conventional order and its paradigms’ (Barber Reference Barber2011: 110). That potential derives in part from the materiality of art, which engages and connects people’s bodies and minds; the affective traction of art moves through bodies, individually and collectively, and adds intensities to emotion and meaning. In anti-racism this is important, because racism is often experienced via the body and perceptions of embodied differences – which, it should be noted, are not confined to biological phenotype but encompass such traits as hair styles, body adornments, habits of body movement and styles of speech: elements that straddle the borders between nature/biology and culture (M’charek, Schramm and Skinner Reference M’charek, Schramm and Skinner2014b: 471; Wade Reference Wade, Figueroa and Wade2022a: 177–181).

Latin American Racial Formations

Chapters 1, 2 and 3 give detailed accounts of the ways art has figured in the racial formations of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia (see also Wade, Scorer and Aguiló Reference Wade, Scorer, Aguiló, Wade, Scorer and Aguiló2019: 13). In this section we give some general context for these formations, also bringing out the way each country is a variation on themes that run through the Latin American region as a whole – and, indeed, through the Americas.

In the Latin American context, Brazil is often seen as relatively ‘Black’: although about half the population identifies as white in the census, the other half identifies as preto (‘black’) and pardo (‘brown’), while those who identify as Indigenous are less than 1 per cent of the total.Footnote ¹⁸ Consequently, after the 1988 multiculturalist constitutional reform and the 1995 admission by president Fernando Henrique Cardoso that the once official image of Brazil as a mestizo ‘racial democracy’ was not entirely accurate, the main thrust of anti-racist policy in Brazil has been directed at Afro-descendants, often in the form of controversial affirmative action programmes offering race-based quotas in higher education admissions and federal employment (Lehmann Reference Lehmann2018; Paschel Reference Paschel2016; Telles Reference Telles2004). In contrast, as already noted, racism against the Indigenous population is rarely named as such and is marginal to the political agenda, despite the importance of ‘the Indian’ in the national imaginary (Pacheco de Oliveira Reference Pacheco de Oliveira2016; see Chapter 2; see also Ramos Reference Ramos1998).Footnote ¹⁹

Yet in recent years environmental and land conflicts have dramatically increased violence against the Indigenous population, with news of assassinations and violent displacement of native peoples having become a daily routine. There have also been numerous cases of Indigenous men and women being publicly abused, being refused service at shops, restaurants and hospitals, or even being expelled from buses, in clear defiance of Brazil’s strong anti-racist laws. This mode of racism has become so open that politicians feel free to make disparaging comments about Indigenous people on live television and in the mainstream press, a trend that only increased under president Bolsonaro (2019–2022), alongside frontal attacks on the status of Indigenous reservations and protected areas.

At the same time, Indigenous activism is now stronger than it has ever been. Besides running for official elected positions such as mayors and councillors and organising themselves in NGOs and political groups, Indigenous Brazilians are increasingly using traditional and non-traditional art forms to counter racism: Indigenous authors are publishing their own books; there has been a well-documented surge of Indigenous cinema production; and an increasing number of visual artists and musicians are making use of venues and media channels based in the Global North to express themselves and, in their own words, educate the non-Indigenous population about their own ways of life.

In contrast to Brazil’s relative Blackness, a key feature of Argentina is that, especially in the twentieth century, dominant narratives portrayed the country, internally and abroad, as mainly white and Europeanised. In contrast to some other Latin American countries in which national identity was deliberately articulated around ideas of mestizaje, representations of Argentina presented it as an anomaly in the region. It was depicted as a nation where the impact of European immigration and the supposed extinction of Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations during the nation-building period at the turn of the twentieth century had produced a racially homogeneous white country.Footnote ²⁰

In recent decades, the rise across Latin America of Indigenous and Black social movements and the associated turn to state multiculturalism – helped in the case of Argentina by a devastating 2001 economic crisis, which unsettled taken-for-granted assumptions about Argentina’s European-style modernity, and by the subsequent left-leaning governments of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015) – have spurred revisionist historians to question this exceptionalism, relocating Argentina instead as another, particularly whitened, variant on the Latin American theme of mestizaje. They have shown that some nation-building discourses gave more room to non-whiteness than previously thought (Aguiló Reference Aguiló2018; Alberto and Elena Reference Alberto and Elena2016), while evidence suggests that people of Indigenous, African and mixed background were not erased but instead forced to incorporate into an allegedly uniform population. Also, as shown in Chapter 3, in a country where Blackness and Indigeneity are often characterised as having been erased from a national narrative, there is a surprisingly lively presence, especially in popular culture, of Black and Indigenous characters, alongside mixed-race figures, such as the racially ambiguous gaucho and the criollo (Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky, Alberto and Elena2016b; Alberto and Elena Reference Alberto and Elena2016; Alberto Reference Alberto2022; Frigerio Reference Frigerio, Guzmán and Geler2013; McAleer Reference McAleer2018; Merino Reference Merino, Rosenthal, Bindman and Randolph2015; Wade Reference Wade2023).Footnote ²¹

This indicates that, while whiteness had become seemingly common-sense and taken for granted, in practice it was a complex and contradictory construct: Argentina has been hailed as a ‘race-less’ country while, in everyday reality, racialised differences are recognised and contribute to the durability of social hierarchies. Racial difference is spoken through a language of class: the term negro is used in everyday interaction not primarily to refer to African background but to lack of civility, associated with provincial and working-class origins and, implicitly, mixed-race ancestry (Aguiló and Vivaldi Reference Aguiló and Vivaldi2023). In recent years, negro has also been used to describe immigrants perceived as phenotypically dark (especially Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians).

Argentina’s ambiguous and precarious notion of whiteness allowed the emergence of interstitial spaces in which subaltern sectors were able to explore forms of resistance. Argentina’s discourse of homogeneity combined with an asymmetric social structure based on race and class were contested throughout the twentieth century by the dark-skinned masses. In recent years, Indigenous groups have also challenged the view of Argentina as a homogeneous white country. The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of expressive forms that expose and oppose the oblique and circuitous ways in which race is written into the scripts of national identity (Aguiló Reference Aguiló2018). Working-class sectors have been developing cultural expressions through which the stigmas historically associated by the white middle class with the negro identity and other non-white subjectivities have been exposed, criticised and appropriated as part of new anti-racist strategies. Nevertheless, the fact that whiteness persists as an image of nationhood indicates its status as a project impossible to renounce.

Colombia sits between Brazil and Argentina insofar as it has a small but substantial Indigenous population (about 4% of the national total), which has a strong and long-standing social movement; and it has a medium-sized Afro-Colombian population (about 10%), which has a more recent and less consolidated social movement (Paschel Reference Paschel2016; Wade Reference Wade1993, Reference Wade2009a).Footnote ²² Dominant portrayals of racial difference align with a common-sense idea of Colombia as a ‘country of regions’, in which Blackness is seen as located predominantly in the poor and infrastructurally underdeveloped Pacific coastal region – where over 70 per cent of people identify as Black – with an important secondary location along the Caribbean coast, even though substantial numbers of Black people live outside these two regions.Footnote ²³ Indigeneity is perceived as more diversely located (in the regions of the Amazon, the Pacific coast, areas of the Caribbean coast and the southwest Andes). It is usually seen as rural and peripheral: the substantial urban Indigenous population is ignored in this racial-regional schema.

Although the state has long given some degree of official status to Indigenous peoples, a major change in the state’s relationship to ethnic minorities occurred in 1991 when constitutional reform gave further rights to Indigenous people and for the first time also recognised Afro-Colombians, or comunidades negras (‘black communities’), as an ‘ethnic group’ with its own cultural traditions. Subsequent legislation, notably Law 70 of 1993, opened the way for land rights for rural Black communities in the Pacific region, among other measures.

Afro-Colombians initially embraced this ethnic definition, despite the fact that it excluded most urban Black people. Recently some sectors have tried to expand the definition towards a more inclusive racialised one that embraces urban Blackness and addresses racialised exclusion from education, housing and job markets. At the same time, Black (and Indigenous) movements have become increasingly concerned with violence and displacement, which have a long history in Colombia, but which from the mid 1990s became much more severe in their impact on Indigenous and especially Black communities. Since then, in worrying lock-step with multiculturalist land-rights legislation, violence and displacement from land have emerged as major issues for these minorities.Footnote ²⁴ Displacement has been construed by many Black activists as a violent mode of racism, and anti-racism now includes adopting the structural position of victim (Cárdenas Reference Cárdenas and Rahier2012, Reference Cárdenas2024).

In Colombia, the change is still under way from culturalist definitions of Blackness towards more racialised ones, and from claims for land and cultural rights to claims for protection and the right to life. It is a shift from an indigenist-style concept of Blackness, which tends to background racism and focus on land and cultural rights, towards a Brazilian-style definition of Blackness, based on criteria of appearance and ancestry.

Latin American racial formations have in common a temporal tension between ideas about the future of mixture, assumed to lead towards ever greater indistinction and mestizo homogeneity, and the past of mixture, which evokes its distinct originary ingredients of Black, Indigenous and white people. Since the multiculturalism of the 1990s, and with the current incipient turn to anti-racism, the emphasis on racialised difference has grown stronger, challenging the standard narrative about what the future might hold. This is true of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, albeit each country displays its own specific conjugation of Blackness, Indigeneity and whiteness.

Methods, Positionalities, Collaborations

The CARLA project began in January 2020.Footnote ²⁵ As described in the Preface, it was directed by Peter Wade, Lúcia Sá and Ignacio Aguiló, who led teams working on Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, respectively, countries chosen to align with the experience of the directors. In addition to the directors, each team had three core members: a post-doctoral researcher employed by the University of Manchester (and, as it happened, a national of the country they were researching); a country-based academic co-investigator; and a country-based advisor. The project also hired several research assistants in each country (see Preface for details).

From the start, a key aim of the project was to explore a wide diversity of artistic practices relevant to anti-racist and decolonial priorities. The idea was to include both Black and Indigenous art production in the project as a whole, thus building on a growing trend to challenge the traditional division between these two racialised categories in academic research (Hooker Reference Hooker2020; Wade Reference Wade2010b, Reference Wade, Andrews and de la Fuente2018). For Brazil, it seems obvious that we should have included Black Brazilian artistic production, given its volume and prominence in artistic and scholarly worlds (de la Fuente Reference de la Fuente, Fuente and Andrews2018). However, this very prominence impelled us from the start to focus on racism against Indigenous peoples, given the paucity of scholarship on the topic; and, if we focused on both Indigenous and Black artists, we feared that Indigenous people would, as is often the case, be relegated to the margins. For Colombia, the team worked in practice mostly with Black artists, and with some mestizo and brown artists such as Margarita Ariza and some members of Las Emperadoras de la Champeta, both mentioned earlier (see Chapter 1). The Argentina team managed greater diversity, building collaborations with Mapuche and Afro-Argentine theatre companies, an Indigenous Qom hip-hop group and an anti-racist art collective, Identidad Marrón, who identify as marrón (literally, chestnut-coloured) (see Chapter 3). These country-specific patterns are reflected in the chapters of this book.

The roster of artists we collaborated with emerged from an initial process of scoping, carried out mainly by the post-doctoral researchers with support from the project directors and the co-investigators and advisors in Latin America. This was followed by a longer process in which these researchers approached artists, invited them to collaborate and built up relationships with them over time. As described in the Preface, much of this was conducted online during pandemic restrictions. The roster was thus shaped partly by the networks of the project team and the interest of artists in the project. In all cases, the post-doctoral researchers, each working in different ways with the co-investigator and advisor in their team, built up collaborations with diverse artists, many of which were later reflected in the project’s YouTube channel and online exhibition, and a selection of which featured in the project’s Festival of Decolonial and Anti-Racist Art, which took place in Manchester in April 2022.Footnote ²⁶

In some ways, the structure of the project reflected prevailing academic hierarchies. In the core team – project directors, co-investigators, advisers and post-doctoral researchers – there was a majority of men and of people who would be seen by most observers in Europe and Latin America as white, although only one person – the overall director, Peter Wade – is male, white and European, while the co-directors Lúcia Sá and Ignacio Aguiló are Latin Americans living in the UK. But there were important elements of diversity: the Colombian co-investigator and advisor are both Black women, while the Colombian post-doc is a Black man. Among the locally-hired research assistants there was also significant diversity, with Indigenous women working in Argentina and Brazil. Not surprisingly, the artists we worked with were predominantly Black and Indigenous, with the exceptions we have noted of Margarita Ariza, some members of Las Emperadoras de la Champeta and the members of the Identidad Marrón collective.

If the structure of the project thus followed, in some respects, a predictable shape influenced by academic and Global North–South hierarchies of gender, race and region, it also reflected to a significant degree changes to those hierarchies caused by the increasing participation of Black and Indigenous people in higher education and in academic employment in Latin America. We also made concerted efforts to build relationships that were truly horizontal and collaborative, in which the artists we worked with could define the direction and shape of the collaboration – artists were also involved as project research assistants in all three countries and one artist acted as an advisor in Colombia. A significant amount of project funds went into supporting activities proposed and designed by the artists; this funding stream was aided by the pandemic, which made it impossible to hold in-person project workshops in each country, thus freeing funds to support artists. We also obtained additional funds from the University of Manchester to support public engagement activities, many of which were proposed and/or designed by the artists. Just as important, a great deal of researchers’ time – especially that of the three post-doctoral researchers – went into supporting activities directed by the artists. This is reflected, for example, in the documentary Terra fértil: Véxoa e a arte indígena contemporânea na Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Fertile Land: Véxoa and Contemporary Indigenous Art in São Paulo’s Pinacoteca), co-produced by Jamille Dias, working with several artists and curators; the film Colheita maldita (Accursed Harvest), by Denilson Baniwa, working with Jamille Dias and artist Naine Terena; and the documentary Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel. Prácticas artísticas antirracistas (Behind the South: Dances for Manuel. Anti-Racist Artistic Practices), produced by Rafael Palacios and Carlos Correa.Footnote ²⁷

The collaborations were also reflected in co-presentations at major conferences and in online discussion events streamed on CARLA’s YouTube channel, in which Black and Indigenous Latin American artists took part on equal terms. Collaboration is evident in the co-authorship of chapters in this book by artists – Liliana Angulo, Rossana Alarcón, Lorena Cañuqueo, Miriam Alvarez, Alejandra Egido, Naine Terena and Rafael Palacios – as well as in the book’s five ‘curated conversations’, which draw on discussions involving a wide array of CARLA artists, and in the book’s Final Reflections. Importantly, these Black and Indigenous authors have contributed to the overall conceptual framing of the book, avoiding a common hierarchy in which Global North researchers deal with ‘theory’ while Global South participants provide ‘data’. Such a simple division between theory and data is barely tenable to begin with and is anyway broken down by the participation of Black and Indigenous artists in the discussions and workshops held during the project, which shaped the conceptual framing of the project, and through their contributions to Chapters 4, 5 and 6, which although they focus on empirical examples also make conceptual arguments grounded in experience. The curated conversations, which foreground the voices of these artists, also have important conceptual dimensions, while the Conclusion contains reflections by artists on their work and on the project overall. The end result is a book that we hope will support anti-racist art and activism, while also making a significant contribution to scholarship.

The methods used in the project were therefore very distant from the traditional models of social science in which some people study others, whether through focus groups, interviews or ethnographic participant observation. Of course, these methods did figure in the research as well, and participant observation in particular was an integral part of collaboration. More formal interviews and focus groups were also used when investigating audience responses to artistic performances and products (Correa Angulo and Alarcón Velásquez Reference Correa Angulo and Velásquez2024; Vivaldi and Cossio Reference Vivaldi and Cossio2021). But the overall tenor of the project was set by the theme of horizontal collaboration, to which this book acts as a testament.

Structure of the Book

The first three chapters, Part I of the book, explore the relationship between art and racial formation in each country. Chapter 1 on Colombia analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, as well as the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The authors show how, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, white and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in ways tinged with primitivism and paternalism, without racism coming into clear view as a social issue. However, by the 1930s and 40s, Black artists and writers were using their practice to critique social inequalities in which racism was identified as an important component. The chapter then focuses on Black art practice, analyzing its increasing politicisation and exploring the work of the Colombian artists who collaborated with CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

Chapter 2 looks at how contemporary Brazilian Indigenous art is rising both in production and public recognition and how it has opened new spaces for a ‘contest of imaginaries’ in Brazilian society, expanding possibilities for the expression of Indigenous rights. Anti-racism frequently takes the form of a struggle to defend rights to ancestral territories and livelihoods and to oppose monocultures of all kinds; as well as the creation of spaces for the similarities in life and struggle that connect people across all forms of difference.

Chapter 3 focuses on challenges to whiteness and Europeanness in Argentine cultural production, contending that the arts have acted as an important platform for critiques of the subtle ways in which race is written into the script of national belonging and difference. The artistic corpus examined includes anti-racist expressions by Afro-descendant and Indigenous creators, but the chapter highlights cultural products by working-class artists (mostly mixed-race people who experience an elusive yet systematic racism) and their white middle-class allies, who together have played a central role in the articulation of strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have contributed to addressing structural racism. The chapter explores how racial diversity went from invisibility to a hypervisibility that mobilises white middle- and upper-class paranoid fears about the Other, but also how affect and emotion allow alliances in the face of racism.

In Part II, the next three chapters are co-authored by CARLA researchers and artists. They draw on specific art practices and productions to explore conceptual questions of art, anti-racism and affect. Chapter 4 focuses on Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia and how it constructs anti-racist narratives, highlighting the role of affect, which works to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a mode of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that help to make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. In particular, the chapter explores Detrás del sur, a recent Sankofa dance work, to see how these anti-racist strategies have informed the creative processes behind the work.

Chapter 5 looks at Véxoa: We Know, the first Indigenous-only arts exhibition held at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and explores how such art can work against the affective dimensions of racism in a number of ways, including disrupting dominant cultural narratives, helping to raise awareness about the diversity of Indigenous peoples, and promoting intercultural understanding and appreciation. The chapter shows how contemporary Indigenous arts in Brazil are unsettling categories persistently associated with native aesthetics, and it demonstrates that Indigenous arts can serve as a form of anti-racist cultural resistance, challenging the dominant culture’s appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous cultures.

Chapter 6 examines the construction of theatrical poetics, which question colonial criteria of creativity and build alternative spaces for drama production in Argentina. The focus is on the development of anti-racist staging practices, which go beyond recognition politics, centring the stage as a point of reconnection of subalternised social trajectories and presenting the lives of Mapuches and Afro-Latin Americans in all their complexity.

Finally, Chapter 7 reflects broadly on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice, focusing on two types of intervention – challenging stereotypes and working with communities – and exploring how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create emotional traction and affective intensity.

Intercalated with these chapters are five curated conversations, which give a direct voice to the experiences and conceptual approaches of a wide range of the artists we worked with. In each case, a CARLA researcher draws on a specific (usually online) discussion or event involving artists and researchers and curates the conversation to bring out key themes and ideas in a concise and punchy format. The first conversation is curated from an online event, ‘Anti-Racist Art in the UK and Latin America: A Conversation’ (2020), which brings together two Latin American and two British artists. The second draws on an online event ‘Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World’ (2020), involving various CARLA artists. The third conversation draws on two texts (produced in 2020–2021) by members of art collective Identidad Marrón, who reflect on their experiences as curators entering a mainly white art scene. The fourth conversation is curated from discussions involving Brazilian Indigenous hip-hop artists (streamed in 2021), while the last item is based on an online discussion (2021) about anti-racist art practices involving the Afro-Colombian collectives Sankofa Danzafro and Colectivo Aguaturbia. The book closes with texts from a selection of the CARLA artists, who were invited to reflect on their experiences working with the project and offer some thoughts on art and anti-racism.