Contemporary Brazilian Indigenous art is rising both in production by and public recognition of artists such as Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbell, Naine Terena and Daiara Tukano. Indigenous literature is also becoming increasingly visible with writers such as Daniel Munduruku, Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Eliane Potiguara and Julie Dorrico. These trends have opened new spaces for a ‘contest of imaginaries’, expanding possibilities for Indigenous rights. For Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, racism is often connected to land and resource control. So anti-racism often takes the form of a struggle to defend ancestral territories and livelihoods, often associated with the ‘multiplication of differences’, opposing monocultures of all kinds and promoting the creation of spaces for the similarities in life and struggle that connect people across differences. First we give an overview of Brazilian Indigenous movements since the 1970s, introducing recurring themes that have concerned writers and artists. Then we describe the development of contemporary Indigenous literature and visual art in Brazil and their relation to anti-racism, with extended case studies from the Brazilian Amazon and the northeast region.

The chapter addresses the different ways in which Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia constructs anti-racist narratives. From the perspective of dance as a practice of irruption and an embodied practice, we focus on the role of affective traction in its varied manifestations, which work to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a way of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. Among the anti-racist strategies channeled through Sankofa’s Afro-contemporary dance are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people by focusing on the message of the dance rather than only its performance; ii) delving into the past, seeking out embodied knowledge and Afro self-referentiality as resources; and iii) developing an Afro-contemporary aesthetic project informed by Afro-Colombian traditional dance and music as well as contemporary styles and rhythms. 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.

This opening chapter outlines the main arguments of the book and introduces the histories of childbirth, domestic medicine and the family. It makes the case for seeing childbearing as a medical and social experience and shows that generation (the early modern term for childbearing) was of great personal, political and cultural significance in the period. The Introduction argues that childbirth was a family affair and shows that family paperwork – diaries, letters, almanacs, account books, commonplace books and other documents – were awash with descriptions of parts of the process of making babies. Generation was framed as being part of the domestic labour that had to be done by family members or by servants to run an orderly household, and was embedded within other everyday practices like healing, clothing and feeding individuals. The literate individuals who kept records in their paperwork were also the individuals who could afford to buy printed books on conduct and medicine that laid out ideal godly practice. By considering paperwork alongside this instructive material, this book uncovers the cultural and practical tensions between prescription and practice.

This chapter systematically teases out and reflects on the antinomies and aporias that characterize each of two broad sets of international human rights solidarity argumentation. These are the broadly shared discourses on the issue that emanate in each case from the Global North and Global South. Why do Global North States tend to accept and focus on binding international human rights obligations in the civil and political (CP) rights area, while demurring regarding similarly mandatory legal duties to express international solidarity in regard to economic and social (ES) rights? And why do Global South countries tend to argue in favor of such binding obligations with regard to ES rights but not nearly as much regarding CP rights? The chapter is mainly concerned with the rather ironic circulation and eclipsing of relevant antinomies and aporias in plain sight; their relationships to state sovereignty argumentation; and their connections to global power relations as ideationally constitutive forces. In the last respect, the key question is what the relative roles of values/norms in international human rights solidarity argumentation are, vis-à-vis global power relations. And these questions should highlight for scholars the imperative to track internationalist praxis over the longue durée.

This chapter explores the relevance of the Christian tradition to contemporary debates on solidarity in international law and human rights. It positions the genealogy of solidarity within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of suffering, love, and salvation are detailed. Linking the Pauline doctrine and writings of early theologians to the processes of modernity – of which notions such as the West, the Global South, good neighborliness, and human rights are a part – the concept of solidarity is traced to a particularly Christian dynamic. As such, the promise of solidarity in international legal discourse, human rights discourse, and refugee discourse is considered as analogous to the way in which forms of messianism manifest themselves through a Christian logic of love, sacrifice, and debt.

This chapter examines early modern expectations of delivery and recovery from childbirth by women. Medical manuals expected women would give birth painfully but without complication, stay in bed (or ‘lie in’) for a month, go to church to give thanks to God for their survival and then return to their normal selves. During this month, they were also expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. Examining doctors’ casebooks reveals that women often sought medical assistance for problems long after delivery. Certain postpartum ailments like breast problems were often perceived as untroubling in medical print, but paperwork reveals that this often meant women could not return to their normal selves for months after birth. Although prescriptive models contained in religious and medical print may have helped to frame women’s experiences of delivery and recovery, they rarely capture the reality of the emotional and bodily difficulties they faced.

Argentina has a tradition of disavowed racism, with dominant narratives of the nation as racially homogenous due to mass European migration and the supposed disappearance of Indigenous, Black and mixed-race peoples. We argue that the arts have enabled critiques of the subtle ways that race is written into national identity. We analyse race and cultural production in Argentina from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, when critiques emerged of discourses of nationality articulated mainly around Europeanness. There are explicitly anti-racist expressions by Afro-descendant and Indigenous creators, but, because of Argentina’s specific racial formation, we focus on cultural products by working-class artists (mostly mixed-race people subject to an elusive yet systematic racism) and their white middle-class allies, who together have fostered strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have contributed to addressing structural racism. These multiple forms of artistic expression illustrate the shifting valences of race in Argentina in which racial diversity at times goes from invisibility to a hypervisibility that mobilises, among the white middle and upper classes, paranoid fears about the Other that justify repression, but which also allow affective alliances in the face of racism.

This section present some final reflections from three artists and groups of artists who offer some thoughts on art and anti-racism and on their experiences with the CARLA project. There are contributions from Arissana Pataxó, an Indigenous Brazilian artist; Miriam Álvarez, Lorena Cañuqueo and Alejandra Egido, Mapuche and Afro-Cuban actors and directors behind the Argentine theatre companies Grupo de Teatro ‘El Katango’ and Teatro en Sepia; and Wilson Borja, an Afro-Colombian graphic artist.

Africa and Europe have had an economic partnership for decades, first around the notion of friendship, then, since the 2000s, around the idea of solidarity. Despite this moral rhetoric, Europe is sanctuarizing itself, cultivating an anti-migratory fantasy and working for a resolute control of African migration. This policy is formalized with the “readmission clause,” whereby certain African immigrants are being posed as unassimilable, undesirable and disposable because they are useless for the neoliberal productive order. Therefore, any flight from exploitation on the continent must be blocked. As this perspective has led to extensive violations and aroused criticism and opposition, this chapter proposes, no longer a hybrid ideology but care. By means of a reading of the history of ideas, we insist on the impasse of the perspective that rejects migration in the name of autochthony. We propose a utopia: to work for the access of all peoples to the general cycle of industrial civilizations; this will bring equality between peoples who will negotiate migrations, taking into account concrete forms of solidarity.

This chapter interrogates the ‘solidarity turn’ (i.e. the increased prevalence of 'solidarity' in international legal discourse or practice) and the extent to which it truly marks a break from the ideas and practices that have characterized the neoliberal age which have shaped the international legal order and arguably led to an aggravation of the very crises solidarity is now called upon to tackle. It does so by using one of the oldest legal expressions of solidarity in international law, namely the law of collective security (CS), exploring its connections to neoliberal ideas. My argument is: (a) that neoliberals made the institutionalization of the market order the only means of securing peace; (b) that they envisaged CS as a system of international policing designed to spread and secure the international market; (c) that this neoliberal vision of CS played a role in shaping the duty of solidarity in the international law of CS; and (d) that existing critiques do not provide us with sufficient tools to challenge neoliberal (market) solidarity. The conclusion sounds a note of warning to the enthusiasm that has surrounded the adoption of solidarity in international law and calls for a renewed engagement with its ideological and material underpinnings.

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.