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.

This chapter contextualizes the first five Italian High Fashion Shows organized by Giorgini within the cultural and commercial scenarios outlined in the previous chapters. The themes highlighted by the promotional activities that took place before 1951, including the recent Italy at Work, are here examined in the novel context of a systematized, biannual series of collective fashion showings. The Shows reinforced the definition of an ‘Italian Look’ in the early 1950s, legitimizing Italian couture further and focusing on moda boutique. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the rhetorical strategies utilized by Giorgini to promote the Shows. In particular, it demonstrates that the use of Renaissance was modelled against prior examples of Fascist propaganda and discourses that had recently been circulating in the American press. The chapter eventually discusses Giorgini’s difficulties in overseeing the Shows and the alleged rivalry with the Parisian fashion industry, deconstructing the traditional narrative of pure competitiveness and instead highlighting collaborative relationships with his French contenders. The analysis concludes with the fifth Show, held in January 1953, by which time the Florentine events had become a set appointment in the transatlantic fashion calendar of seasonal presentations, and Italian fashion and couture exports were firmly established on the American market. The acknowledgement of the international market was by then complete and Italian dressmaking was now effectively recognised with the new term ‘Italian couture’.

Daumier first explored intersections between great art and laughter in his early paintings inspired by Jean de La Fontaine, establishing himself as an artist in line with celebrated satirists of the French literary canon. La Fontaine’s Fables allowed Daumier and his fellow caricaturists to make allusions to contemporary political issues in the 1830s when direct political speech was restricted in the illustrated press. These fables were ubiquitous in French schools in the nineteenth century, even though La Fontaine’s reputation placed him in an adversarial role with King Louis XIV. Their familiar moral messages and meditations on power helped nineteenth-century caricaturists express anxieties about the king’s overreach and the suppression of the opposition press. La Fontaine later became the subject of Daumier’s first painting submission to the Salon, The miller, his son, and the ass in 1849. This chapter explores the popularity of La Fontaine’s fables in 1830s caricature and academic painting at mid-century and interrogates the role of humour in ‘great art’. It establishes Daumier’s The miller, his son, and the ass as an early and profound statement of the artist’s commitment to literary satire, arguing that this work shows him working out a balance between abstraction and contemporaneity in his painting practice.

The introduction explains the starting point of the book, a methodological reflection that assesses how the business vision of commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini and his establishment of the Italian High Fashion Shows in Florence in 1951 have crystallised into a mythologised place in the history of Italian fashion. The text adopts the historical perspective of historian Marc Bloch’s preoccupation with origins to closely read the celebratory narrative that mythicized Giorgini in Italian fashion history until the early 2000s. It contextualises the research presented in the book with previous studies of fashion under Fascism, to highlight the continuity that exists between the regime and democracy in terms of business practices, fashion professionals and manufacturers. The chapter then presents the theoretical framework, grounded in the new business history of fashion studies and particularly on Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s work on fashion intermediaries. It outlines the need to understand the social realities of postwar Italian fashion through a detailed study of the activities situated between production and consumption, well represented by the main actors discussed in the book: the G.B. Giorgini firm, the non-profit agency Handicraft Development, Inc., its Italian branch CADMA, and other Italian fashion councils. Finally, after a critical evaluation of the primary sources discussed, especially those in the Giorgini archive in Florence, the chapter explains the book's contribution to the field of transnational history, as it rewrites a history of the cultural and commercial interactions of postwar Italy with North America within the larger configuration of the international fashion market.

The final chapter explains the methodological contribution of the book in its critical reassessment of the Giorgini archive. Here, the value of the archive is acknowledged as a complementary piece in the puzzle that is the international business history of fashion in its own right, but also as an example of how a fashion professional built the documentary foundation of his legacy. With this in mind, the conclusion suggests that while recent studies have identified Giorgini’s political intentions in his efforts to promote an idea of Italian fashion abroad as a form of ‘soft power’, these should instead be seen as ‘soft power ambitions’, in line with David W. Ellwood’s conceptualisation of the term coined by Joseph S. Nye. In addition, there had been similar attempts by other organisations before and after Giorgini, who sought the patronage of influential American citizens and members of the diplomatic community to promote their Italian fashion events. The final sections list the specific contributions of each chapter and conclude by contextualising the impact of the Italian High Fashion Shows on the subsequent emergence of the ‘Italian Look’ and the international relevance of the ready-to-wear industry in the late 1970s. The chapter concludes by explaining how the Shows laid the conceptual and discursive groundwork for the industry, which helped it later move away from equating Italian fashion with transatlantic tourism and an almost folkloristic gaze.

Daumier painted scenes from Molière’s plays when they were being revived by nineteenth-century theatres, whose ability to commission new work was restricted by censorship. In moments of intense repression, theatre directors staged plays by the beloved seventeenth-century dramaturge to stage oblique attacks on the government. In the 1820s, French revivals of Molière’s plays became sites of vocal – and sometimes violent – public commentary about censorship and government overreach. The third chapter examines Daumier’s representations of nineteenth-century revivals of Molière’s comedies The Imaginary Invalid from 1673 and The Impostures of Scapin from 1671 in watercolour, oil, and caricature in light of the politicized revival of Molière and legal frameworks linking caricature to theatrical performance. It argues that by turning to Molière as a subject in paint when explicitly political material was being censored in the illustrated press, Daumier’s works intervened creatively in the contested spaces of visual expression and political critique in Second Empire France.

Daumier’s early series Celebrities of the juste milieu, c.1832–35, is a vital first case study to understand the artist’s first negotiations with fragile expansions to political freedom and the short-lived abolition of censorship. It is a series of clay portrait sculptures of French parliamentary deputies that served as models for the artist’s own caricatures in print. A popular myth claimed that the artist smuggled clay in his pocket during visits to parliament, signalling that the plaster statuettes both memorialized the urgent fragility of new freedoms in the July Monarchy and preserved access to the newly-opened legislative chamber. Drawing from traditions of puppetry and caricature, the Celebrities series satirized contemporary efforts to memorialize ‘great men’, using the comic mask to mock politicians’ artificiality and deception as well as calling on traditions of popular protest. Playing with the threshold between likeness and exaggeration, these caricatural portraits are shown to mediate between imitation and malformation, theorizing the mechanisms of satire in visual form.