This conversation draws on an online discussion involving Brazilian Indigenous hip-hop artists Bruno Veron and Kelvin Peixoto, of the Brô MC’s duo, and Kunumi MC (a.k.a. Owerá). The Brazilian rap movement began in São Paulo in late 1980s, led by Black performers and activists, among them DJ Thaide and Racionais MC’s. As in other countries, Brazilian rap and hip-hop are mostly urban. Racionais MC’s focus on youth life in the peripheral areas of urban São Paulo, featuring topics such as racism, social inequality and drug violence. These themes held clear appeal for Indigenous peoples confronting racism, displacement and violence in Brazil. Performing in a combination of Guarani and Portuguese, Brô MC’s emerged in 2009 as the first Indigenous rap and hip-hop group, speaking to the violence and racism against Indigenous peoples that are particularly intense in the region they come from, Mato Grosso do Sul.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Moral distress as a reason for ethics consultation is common, but perceived or real racism is underrecognized as a potential cause. The consultation requested in this case was nominally for moral distress, but elements of cultural misunderstanding and culturally relevant value conflicts rapidly became apparent. Cultural concordance between the ethics consultant and the patient’s family enhanced communication and allowed the medical care team to change their perspective on interactions they had observed and previously considered to be belittling between family members and staff. This led to a broadening of medically permissible options being considered and ultimately resulted in a discharge plan that was acceptable and welcome by both the patient’s family and the ICU staff. Further discussion of reasons why greater diversity in ethics consultation members may be helpful.

This chapter dives into one of the most difficult clinical ethics consultations in the author’s career. A vibrant patient suffers a cardiac arrest and severe anoxic brain injury on their way to dialysis. After weeks of ICU treatment, the family came when the patient was liberated from the ventilator. The daily spontaneous breathing trials made everyone think (and prepare) that the patient would only have minutes to live after extubation. Yet, the patient began to breath. When the minutes turned into an hour, the yelling began. The ethics pager went off moments later, and no one could have be prepared for journey ahead. Trust was gone, and the current course of comfort care would bring an irreversible outcome. The effort to buy time in the face of uncertainty resulted in a complex sequence of events that unfolded over months. The author reflects on the case and shares the opportunity to learn by failing forward.

Concerns about the role of prejudice and racial discrimination first expressed by Voltaire and Zola were often at the forefront of pre-DNA campaigns to correct wrongful convictions. Despite this, the American innocence movement frequently neglected the role of racism in wrongful convictions. It neglected links between lynching and frequent DNA exonerations, where white victims misidentified Black men. Racism was recognized in the wrongful convictions of the Exonerated (Central Park) Five but not in other similar wrongful convictions of Black teenagers. Trump mobilized anti-Black racism in his calls for the Five to be executed. The role of both anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism in the 1971 wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall Jr. for the murder of a Black teenager in Canada is examined. A 1989 public inquiry into this wrongful conviction did not ignore racism in the same way as similar American inquiries into wrongful convictions. Patterns of anti-Indigenous racism and the role of stereotypes in the wrongful conviction of Indigenous men in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States are identified. Finally, the place of anti-racism in the future evolution of innocence movements is discussed.

This Chapter examines the ways Prospero vocally projects his authority in The Tempest, either on his own or in conjunction with other entities. It unpacks the vast range of vocal tricks Prospero uses to gain and wield power over others, especially his disgruntled slave, Caliban. Drawing on the work of Jennifer Lynn Stoever, it shows how Prospero imposes and enforces a “sonic color line” that punishes Caliban’s vocal difference in a way that enacts racial oppression through the ear. To the degree that it does this, the play chillingly anticipates racialized listening practices that remain with us today. Nevertheless, the play’s conclusion gives us reason to believe that Prospero perhaps comes to recognize, regret, and even repent of his vocal tyranny. Though the drama stops short of enacting a truly ethical dialogue, this possibility calls out to us, albeit faintly, at the end of the play.

Chapter 4 examines American soldiers’ actual and perceived sexual relations with Chinese women, the most sensitive subject that triggered the strongest anti-American sentiment. While Chinese conservatives, out of racial and sexual anxieties, maligned women who consorted with GIs, liberals and self-identified “Jeep girls” ingeniously invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking rape incident, the once lively debate over modernity was quickly silenced as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism.

Chapter 2 explores American servicemen’s everyday lives through their sensory encounters with China. While largely maintaining a privileged lifestyle separate from Chinese society, they also forged intimate connections with local populations by exchanging goods, service, language, and culture, an encounter that both followed and contradicted official policies and popular representations. As tourists, consumers, cultural messengers, and diplomats in the field, their encounters with China were characterized by fascination and contempt, enchantment and alienation. While their sensorial experiences and narratives were conditioned by preexisting Orientalist beliefs and racist prejudices, GIs’ cultural identities were reshaped by daily interactions involving new sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touches.