Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America

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In a global context of persistent racism and racial inequality, alongside the growing "post-racial" denial of their importance, this project will explore the role of the arts in challenging racism. The project aims to investigate the sociality, practices and discourses of contemporary cultural producers working in literature and visual and performing arts who focus on issues of racial difference, racism and anti-racism in three Latin American contexts: Brazil, Colombia and Argentina.Why the arts? We work on the basis that the arts have always played a crucial role in anti-racist movements, serving as important tools with which to protest against and educate about racism. The arts have the ability to mobilise emotions through narrative and performance, and this makes them well suited to deal with racism's dependence on an emotive logic. By combining expertise from the arts and the social sciences in a cultural studies approach, we seek to locate artistic practices that address racial inequality and racism in their social and cultural context; we aim to map how the producers, their practices and their products circulate in the social world and produce effects there that contribute to the struggle against racism. While rationally devised social policy addressing socio-economic conditions is vital to correcting racial inequalities, it can simply by-pass, be undermined by and even exacerbate the visceral emotions that racial difference produces in a racially hierarchical society. It is these emotions we seek to approach and address through the medium of art and performance.Why Latin America? Because the region has a long history in which "post-raciality" - by which we mean the tendency to deny or minimise the significance of racism and racial inequality, invoking a colour-blind universalism - has co-existed with marked racial inequality and with often veiled but still powerful racist attitudes. This paradoxical co-existence is becoming characteristic of other areas of the world, in the wake of post-World War II trends that made "race" politically toxic and made the denial of racism commonplace, while racial inequalities remain and even grow. We contend that the way struggles against racism in Latin America address this long-standing co-existence can hold lessons for anti-racism more widely. For example, the post-racial claim that increased inter-racial mixture indicates decreasing racism is belied by the fact that Latin American countries have often been majority mestizo (mixed-race) societies for over two centuries, without this having solved the problem of racial inequality and racism.A notable feature of the project is that it encompasses anti-black and anti-indigenous racism in a region where practices and attitudes prejudicial to indigenous people are often not labelled as racism, but also at a time at which this label is becoming increasingly popular in struggles against such prejudice, highlighting the structural dimensions of indigenous disadvantage. A further strength of the project is its comparative approach, which seeks to use the rather different racial formations of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia to assess how generic or country-specific anti-racism strategies are. Research teams in each country will bring together senior and junior, UK-based and Latin American researchers in the social sciences and arts to work with a range of artists and performers to explore diverse practices, including for example indigenous literatures, visual arts and cinema in Brazil, hip-hop music in Brazil and Colombia, Afro-Colombian art and an indigenous-black organisation that uses performance as a pedagogical tool, and street dance and commercial music forms alongside literature and political art in Argentina. Project researchers will work closely with artists and performers and will collaborate with them in project workshops, which will also have a public-facing component.