Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA)

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.

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.