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.

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.

Using the case of the exhibition Véxoa: Nós Sabemos, the first Indigenous-only arts exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2020–2021), we explore the deconstruction of the coloniality of a visual culture based on stereotypes of Indigenous peoples; self-representation as a strategy to combat the invisibilisation of Indigenous authorship in Brazil; and Indigenous arts as affective interventions that amplify the struggle for Indigenous rights. We show how contemporary Indigenous arts in Brazil are unsettling categories persistently associated with native aesthetics, and enacting anti-racism by challenging the dominant culture’s appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous cultures. In Véxoa, objects perceived as artifacts or crafts by hegemonic visual cultures are recontextualised as works of art, empowering Indigenous artists in symbolic, political and economic terms. Indigenous artists can disrupt the power dynamics that perpetuate racism, demonstrating that, in order to confront colonial and extractive practices that have historically marginalised Indigenous peoples, it is important for museums to establish collaborative relationships with Indigenous artists and community members in the curatorial process.

Chapter 4 examines three works: the Falucho monument, both in its creation and in its initial location in Buenos Aires and its subsequent relocation; the portrait of Eusebio de la Santa Federación, a jester by Juan Manuel de Rosas, which differs from other images of the same figure; and the representations of Tía Rosa, a pastry seller on the streets of Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that, during this period, portraits of Afro-Argentines are rare and limited to military personnel, especially toward the end of the century. These three portraits depict a common soldier, a female pastry vendor or a cook, and a buffoon. So the question is why three people were portrayed who had trades or fulfilled roles effectively but not exclusively performed by a large part of the Afro-Argentine population. This assignment of social and labor roles, similar to those they were forced to perform during slavery, became stereotypical. This operation circumscribed Afro-descendants to the past, banishing them from the present in which the images were produced, and hence from the future as well.

Chapter 5 focuses on two biographical compilations of Afro-Argentines who are considered role models for the community. These biographies not only present a written portrait of each individual but also include a corresponding visual portrait, a feature that enriches the compilations. They were an attempt to construct an Afro-Argentine memory and imaginary, and the construction of this collective memory implied affection, bonds of proximity, and even intimacy The inclusion of portraits shows how important images were to the promoters of the publication in their role as mentors of the community. On the one hand, the inclusion of engravings was a way of complying with the precepts of progress and civilization, given the growing development of illustrated publications at the time. On the other hand, the possibility of seeing and recognizing the faces of notable people implied an affective dimension of which Afro-Porteño intellectuals were aware. This was because, in addition to being individuals who enjoyed a certain prestige (to a greater or lesser extent) not only within the group but also in the rest of Buenos Aires society, the members of the community were in almost daily contact with them and their relatives, often as friends.

Chapter 1 focuses on Afro-Porteños’ visual representations as domestic servants. The corpus of images under analysis is from the end of the colonial period to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Examining this iconographic motif is relevant because many of the ideas and conventions associated to the image of Afro-descendants in Argentina were and are formulated according to this tradition. The stigma of servitude associated to their enslaved past was constant in the assignment of this labor role and therefore became a stereotype, as Afro-Porteños themselves demonstrated in their periodicals in the late nineteenth century. Stereotyping’s after-effects can be seen to the present. One might think that, in today’s world, representations such as those analyzed in this chapter no longer exist. However, the representation of African descendants as servants has been used for centuries and has become widely naturalized.