Art and Anti-Racism in Latin America, 2023

Wade, Peter (2024). Art and Anti-Racism in Latin America, 2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-856647

In a global context of persistent racism and racial inequality, alongside the growing "post-racial" denial of their importance, this project explored the role of the arts in challenging racism. The project aimed 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 sought to locate artistic practices that address racial inequality and racism in their social and cultural context; we aimed 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 sought 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 brought 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 worked closely with artists and performers and collaborated with them in project workshops, some of which also had a public-facing component.

Data description (abstract)

Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA) was a three-year project (January 2020 to May 2023) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) to explore how artists in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia address racial diversity in their work and how they use their art to challenge racism. The project was based in the University of Manchester and research teams focused on each country brought 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 Indigenous visual and performance arts in Brazil (including Indigenous hip-hop), Afro-Colombian visual art, poetry and dance, and Mapuche and Afro-Argentine theatre companies as well as an Argentine art collective that uses performance and visual arts as pedagogical and decolonial tools. Project researchers worked closely with artists and performers and collaborated with them in various public-facing activities.

The collaborations led to the production of items for an online exhibition (https://www.digitalexhibitions.manchester.ac.uk/s/carla-en/page/home; https://figshare.com/s/acbe67be51ceca9b4b86).

The data uploaded here consists of transcripts of:
1. six anonymised online interviews with Colombian people interested in Afro-Colombian music and dance; they talk about their personal trajectories and their relationship with Blackness and Black music and dance.
2. transcripts of four anonymised focus groups held online with Colombian participants interested in Afro-Colombian music and dance; in two groups, they talk about their feelings and thoughts about Afro-Colombian contemporary dance and, in two other groups, about champeta (an Afro-Colombian popular music style).
3. an anonymised transcript of an interview with an Indigenous Brazilian youth leader and journalist (EE) from the Guajajara people in Maranhão, Brazil.
4. a transcript of a recording made by Indigenous Brazilian artist Jaider Esbell about his work, especially recorded for the CARLA project.
5. an anonymised transcript of interviews with key participants in the exhibition Véxoa: Nós Sabemos, shown at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, October 2020 to March 2021.
6. five anonymised transcripts of interviews with: an Indigenous Argentinian hip-hop group; four members of an Argentinian anti-racist art collective.

The data files are zipped into folders by country. An Excel spreadsheet and a read-me file are included with details of each file.

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