Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America

在种族主义和种族不平等持续存在的全球背景下，随着对其重要性的“后种族”否认的日益增长，该项目将探索艺术在挑战种族主义中的作用。该项目旨在调查当代文学、视觉和表演艺术领域的文化制作人的社会性、实践和话语，他们关注拉丁美洲三个国家（巴西、哥伦比亚和阿根廷）的种族差异、种族主义和反种族主义问题。为什么是艺术？我们工作的基础是，艺术在反种族主义运动中一直发挥着至关重要的作用，是抗议和教育种族主义的重要工具。艺术有能力通过叙事和表演来调动情感，这使得它们非常适合处理种族主义对情感逻辑的依赖。通过在文化研究方法中结合艺术和社会科学的专业知识，我们寻求在其社会和文化背景下定位解决种族不平等和种族主义的艺术实践；我们的目标是描绘生产者，他们的做法和他们的产品如何在社会世界中流通，并在那里产生有助于反对种族主义斗争的影响。虽然合理设计社会经济状况的社会政策对于纠正种族不平等至关重要，但它可以简单地绕过、破坏甚至加剧种族等级社会中种族差异所产生的内在情绪。正是这些情感，我们试图通过艺术和表演的媒介来接近和解决。为什么是拉丁美洲？因为该地区有着悠久的历史，“后种族主义”——我们指的是否认或尽量减少种族主义和种族不平等的重要性的倾向，援引一种不分肤色的普遍主义——与明显的种族不平等以及往往隐蔽但仍然强大的种族主义态度共存。这种矛盾的共存正成为世界其他地区的特征，二战后的趋势使“种族”在政治上有毒，使否认种族主义变得司空见惯，而种族不平等仍然存在，甚至还在扩大。我们认为，拉丁美洲反对种族主义的斗争处理这种长期共存的方式可以为更广泛地反对种族主义提供教训。例如，种族混合增加表明种族主义减少的后种族主义说法是错误的，因为拉丁美洲国家在两个多世纪以来往往是多数混血儿（混合种族）社会，但这并没有解决种族不平等和种族主义问题。该项目的一个显著特点是，在一个对土著人民有偏见的做法和态度往往不被贴上种族主义的标签的地区，它包含了反黑人和反土著的种族主义，而且这个标签在反对这种偏见的斗争中越来越流行，突出了土著不利的结构方面。该项目的另一个优点是其比较方法，该方法设法利用阿根廷、巴西和哥伦比亚相当不同的种族构成来评估反种族主义战略的普遍性或国别性。每个国家的研究团队将把社会科学和艺术领域的高级和初级、英国和拉丁美洲的研究人员聚集在一起，与一系列艺术家和表演者合作，探索不同的实践，例如包括土著文学、巴西的视觉艺术和电影、巴西和哥伦比亚的嘻哈音乐、非裔哥伦比亚艺术和一个将表演作为教学工具的土著黑人组织。街头舞蹈和商业音乐形式以及文学和政治艺术。项目研究人员将与艺术家和表演者密切合作，并将在项目讲习班上与他们合作，项目讲习班也将有面向公众的部分。

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.