The conversation is curated from an online event, Anti-Racist Art in the UK and Latin America: A Conversation (11 November 2020), with Daiara Tukano, Liliana Angulo, SuAndi, and Ekua Bayunu. The line-up was designed in order to explore differences and similarities between experiences of and ideas about racism in Latin America and the UK from the perspectives of Black and Indigenous artists.

Solidarity is a collective moral relation, and political solidarity, more specifically, is “a committed unity of peoples on a range of interpersonal to social-political levels” connecting their actions for a cause. Collective action to bring about social change in political solidarity includes a variety of potential harms for participants and for the collective whole. Although numerous accounts of solidarity describe the assumption of collective risks, I demonstrate that the solidary relation also includes a willingness to take up associated commitments meant both to mitigate social risks from the larger society within which it forms and ensure the ability for some members to contribute from their particularity. In addition, the relation of solidarity itself carries its own set of risks that participants accept with the belief that collective action offers a better prospect for social change than acting alone. Using examples to illustrate what is at stake, I discuss four facets of risk in solidarity: collective risk, personal risk, social risk, and relational risk. Assessing the potential for harm or exposure to danger in solidarity offers a way to think about expectations against domination and fostering trust within the moral relation.

In Chapter 8, we use an experiment which presents a large sample of Black and White respondents with a press release from a hypothetical politician. The press release differs by whether it discusses a non-racial liberal issue (climate change), a high-profile racial issue (police reform), and a low-profile racial issue (manufacturing employment discrimination). We also vary the race of the hypothetical politician. The results demonstrate that racial rhetorical representation improves perceptions of both Black and White politicians among African Americans. However, White elected officials benefit most from speaking about lower profile racial issues. This demonstrates that the form of racial outreach that White elected officials are the least likely to engage in may help them the most with Black people. Qualitative responses reveal that Black respondents perceive more policy congruence, empathy, and trust in Black elected officials when they engage in both forms of racial rhetorical representation. However, Black respondents are much more trusting of White politicians to follow through their rhetoric with action when it is tied to a low-profile racial issue.

Based on conversations between the authors, two of them directors of theatre companies, one Afro and the other Mapuche, in Argentina, we examine the construction of theatrical poetics, which question colonial criteria of creativity and build alternative spaces for drama production in Argentina. We discuss 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-descendants in all their complexity. We focus on four axes: a) theatrical poetics as a way to move and generate community via affective interventions; b) theatre as a method of research into Afro and Mapuche histories and lives in their multiplicity and which can generate dramaturgies that challenge ideologies of a European nation; c) procedures that seek to decolonise the bodies of actresses and audiences, using gestures and embodied memories, and to challenge stereotypes about racialised women; and d) a reconceptualisation of the notion of body-territory to analyse how, using the stage, forms of life are reconstructed in all their heterogeneity. Both companies challenge the project of a white-colonial Argentina and bring politics to art.

Chapter 7 describes the fortunes of Mwaura three years on from the original fieldwork. It draws attention to heightened anxieties about social breakdown illuminated by the author’s host family’s own breaking apart, and two deaths – one of a neighbourhood youth, and another of a neighbourhood elder, the same young man’s father. This ethnographic epilogue crystallises key issues brought out throughout the book: male struggles with alcoholism, anxieties about downward social mobility, the damaging effects of family breakdown, and contestation over landed futures.

Using the case of the exhibition Véxoa: Nós Sabemos, the first Indigenous-only arts exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2020–2021), we explore the deconstruction of the coloniality of a visual culture based on stereotypes of Indigenous peoples; self-representation as a strategy to combat the invisibilisation of Indigenous authorship in Brazil; and Indigenous arts as affective interventions that amplify the struggle for Indigenous rights. We show how contemporary Indigenous arts in Brazil are unsettling categories persistently associated with native aesthetics, and enacting anti-racism by challenging the dominant culture’s appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous cultures. In Véxoa, objects perceived as artifacts or crafts by hegemonic visual cultures are recontextualised as works of art, empowering Indigenous artists in symbolic, political and economic terms. Indigenous artists can disrupt the power dynamics that perpetuate racism, demonstrating that, in order to confront colonial and extractive practices that have historically marginalised Indigenous peoples, it is important for museums to establish collaborative relationships with Indigenous artists and community members in the curatorial process.