This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

This chapter explores the theoretical themes of the book: art, politics and anti-racism; emotion and affect in art and politics; Latin American racial formations. It outlines the research project on which the book is based: Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA).

A conversation curated from an online event, Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World. Artists from different parts of Latin America talk about their work from a decolonial and anti-racist perspective. Participants include Miriam Álvarez, director of the Mapuche theatre company El Katango; Alejandra Ejido, director of the Afro-Argentine company Teatro en Sepia; Ashanti Dinah Orozco, Afro-Colombian poet and Afro-feminist activist; Rafael Palacios, founder and director of the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro; and Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa, Brazilian Indigenous visual artists.

The conversation draws on two texts by members of the art collective Identidad Marrón, which both explore how racialised subalterns can decolonise the art world and specifically museums. The first is a statement by visual artist Abril Caríssimo; the second is a text by Flora Alvarado y América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, reflecting on their experience of curating an exhibition titled Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?) for the public Palais de Glace museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

This chapter reflects on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Drawing on the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), I focus on two types of intervention that I believe help us to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. The two types are challenging stereotypes and working with communities, and I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create emotional traction and affective intensity. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that artists and organisations can use to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce systemic racism and critical race theory. It begins with the story of Breonna Taylor, a successful health-care professional and twenty-six-year-old Black woman who was killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, by plainclothes White police officers in 2020. It galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racism, the approach to racism that recognizes that all institutions and persons play a role in it, including us. This chapter reviews the history of police violence in the US, the defining features of systemic racism and popular myths about it, and some major themes in critical race theory, a framework that can help us see why race and racism were invented and why they persist despite reform. Colorblind racial ideology, multiculturalism, and anti-racism are discussed as strategies that deal with racism. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project. It ends with a discussion of anti-racism, police violence, and justice for Breonna Taylor.

Chapter 4 uses assemblage theory, which is an anti-colonialist theory of social and spatial construction that has traction in the Global South, to show how urban inequalities become assembled, disassembled, and reassembled over time and yet how grassroots activism for social and environmental justice and for community resilience can change the form and functions of cities. Buchanan arose at a time when the role of urban planning in the US cities was growing but largely conceived as the top–down imposition of order and dominant values on urban space. However, we are increasingly aware of just how contested and evolving the practice of urban planning and urban development are. Case studies of green gentrification from Los Angeles, California and Accra, Ghana illustrate the competing ideological perspectives on resilience in cities and the potential for and yet tentativeness of progress towards social justice in urban planning. The chapter explores the connections of racism in American land use with colonialism in the Global South, and the commonalities in the experiences of grassroots social-justice movements across cities worldwide.

Critics misunderstood Lacan’s thought for decades. They interpreted him as a theorist who reduced subjectivity to its social and linguistic determinations. What they missed was his emphasis, following Kant and Hegel, on subjectivity. This is what both Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec provide when they burst onto the Lacanian scene in 1989. Their works place the emphasis in Lacan’s theory on the problem of subjectivity insofar as the subject remains irreducible to the social order. They uncover a radical version of Lacan that subsequent theorists pick up in the fields of queer theory, feminism, anti-racism, and Marxism. This version of Lacan remains vibrant to this day with many adherents in many disciplines.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion of the book and traces how trends set by imperial historians of the nineteenth century framed the Tailors’ conspiracy as dangerous and as an isolated phenomenon while championing the 1789 conspiracy in Minas Gerais as foundational to Brazilian independence. Historians of the twentieth century rightly combated those efforts and fought to establish the conspiracy as equally significant as the plot in Minas Gerais. The book ends with the proposition that historians of the Tailors’ Conspiracy no longer need to do this kind of work. Instead, this book demonstrates the richness that comes from studying the conspiracy in an empire-wide context and in studying it from the vantage point of relations and not simply from the vantage points of ideology and rhetoric.