This chapter will reflect on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Reviewing the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), we can see that there are many ways artists can embody anti-racist and decolonial elements in artistic practice. For example, they can work towards decolonising spaces, especially institutional spaces, in the art world.Footnote ¹ They can use their art to communicate or channel another entire way of being, living and feeling in the world, challenging an entire system of interlocking oppressions and inequalities – racism, capitalism, sexism, heterosexism, anthropocentrism and so on.Footnote ²

In the chapter, I focus on two types of affective intervention that I believe help us to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. I label the two types as (1) challenging stereotypes and (2) working with communities. I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create affective traction. I think these modes of practice have specific characteristics that make a comparison of them interesting and useful. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that scholars, artists and organisations may find useful to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions.

Ambivalent Effects/Affects in Art Practices

The key argument of the chapter is that artistic practices that intervene in the world and mobilise affect towards decolonial and anti-racist ends have ambivalent effects. Challenging stereotypes is a vital and necessary activity; it is also necessary to bear in mind that it brings with it the possibility of reproducing and even reinforcing those same stereotypes. Working with communities to produce artistic works can also risk reinforcing stereotypes and it usually requires funding, which brings risks of co-optation by funding bodies. If the communities are racially diverse, working with them may also dilute a concentrated focus on racism. I argue that, while challenging stereotypes is an important and necessary mode of action, community-based work provides certain useful affordances and possibilities that are less available to modes of practice that focus on challenging stereotypes. The latter modes tend to be more insidiously ‘haunted’ by the racist meanings and unconscious affective intensities attached to the stereotypes they set out to contest. Working with communities involves multi-stranded social relations that operate across racialised differences and mitigate binary objectifications and stereotyping. In short, artistic practices and interventions can have ambivalent and even contradictory effects, in large part depending on how they are interpreted by audiences and fitted into existing understandings of the world.

The reasons for the ambivalence of artistic interventions are linked, first, to the nature of artistic practice and, second, to the way art is inserted into racial capitalism and structures of coloniality. Regarding the first point, I agree with Alfred Gell (Reference Gell1998) that art objects have agency and create effects in the world through their relational engagement with other objects and people. Gell denies that art objects encode symbolic propositions about the world, but my view is that symbolic propositions can also have relational agency in the world; there is no mutually exclusive opposition between doing and saying. Art objects are also examples of what Sara Ahmed calls objects of emotion, which include material objects, images, and oral and written statements. These objects circulate in the world and, over time, accumulate affective value, becoming ‘sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 11). This happens in ways that tend to erase the history of accumulation so that emotions appear to reside naturally in the objects or in people, obscuring the fact that ‘what we feel might be dependent on past interpretations that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 171). These two theoretical footholds provide a way to explore how artistic practices have effects in the world and they both suggest that, because art objects are relational and circulate in affective economies, they can produce multiple effects. The reason why this multiplicity might be structured as a contradictory kind of ambivalence is linked to the second point: the way art is inserted into racial capitalism and structures of coloniality.

According to Terry Eagleton (Reference Eagleton1990), with the Enlightenment there emerged an understanding of ‘the aesthetic’ as a ‘discourse of the body’ (materiality, the senses, instincts, imagination), but also as a mediator between the body and the mind (reason, rationality) in the process of forming human subjectivities (Reference Eagleton1990: 13). The aesthetic thus involves both the senses and reason and it is the way in which rationality (the law, reasoned understandings) is incorporated into the affective life of the body, regulating it in accordance with the dictates of rationality and law, while also allowing bodily sensibilities a degree of autonomy. But the introjection of rationality into the operations of the body/senses has historically – under colonialism and racial capitalism – also been the introjection of classism, racism and sexism (often legitimated by science) into socialised bodies, as a way of controlling and regulating them in hegemonic fashion. However, insofar as the aesthetic is rooted in the body, as well as mediating between body and mind, or affect and reason, it can also be a means of questioning reason and its regimes of governance, from the space of relative autonomy that the body has, even in its constitution through social processes. The aesthetic thus has an inherent and ambivalent duality, located between reproducing the status quo and challenging it in various ways, which range from simple unruliness to movements for progressive social transformation and which all derive from the lived experience of inequality and oppression.

As noted in the book’s Introduction, this duality has been noted by others. Doris Sommer recognises that ‘culture’ can be repressive and constraining, but thinks that ‘cultural agency’ – defined as creative activities that contribute to society, such as pedagogy, research, activism and the arts – can inject a ‘dangerous supplement to systems that prefer to be left alone’ (Sommer Reference Sommer and Sommer2006a: 13). Focusing more directly on art, Diana Boros distinguishes between ‘plastic’, conformist, profit-oriented, mainstream art, which, while it may contribute to a sense of community, is repetitive and overproduced, and ‘visionary’, transcendent and rebellious art, which opens important political possibilities by encouraging within people ‘the expansion of their imaginative capabilities, their true independence (knowledge of self) and their sense of empathy’ (Boros Reference Boros2012: 15). The categories Boros uses map roughly onto what Susan Buck-Morss (Reference Buck-Morss1992) calls ‘anaesthetics’, which describes the mind-numbing control of people’s lived connection to the world produced by modern media from the nineteenth century onwards, and ‘aesthetics’, which, in the meaning it originally had before being hijacked by these media, described people’s lived engagement with the world (i.e. Eagleton’s discourse of the body). For Jacques Rancière, art is inherently political because it creates an image of society, what it and its people look like and what it is permissible to show about them. As such, the political context can allow for art to be used for regressive and progressive ends: ‘The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2013: 19). Likewise, with specific reference to the use of images in anti-racist work, Mónica Moreno Figueroa (Reference Moreno Figueroa2024: 2326) argues that ‘anti-racist projects may include the possibility of re-inscribing racist discourse and practice’, due to the contradictory ability of images to explain and illustrate, but also ensnare.

This is important for my purposes because the affective affordances of the various modalities of artistic anti-racism that I describe in this chapter are never unidirectional, univalent or unambiguous. On the other hand, neither are they necessarily classifiable as either one thing or another. In fact, a given artistic practice or work can have contradictory effects at the same time, depending on its relational location in a network of articulations and connections. While prima facie it may seem as if anti-racist art should by definition be progressive, according to the intentions of its creators, this is rarely a straightforward matter, if only because things can be read against the grain of these intentions. And these readings are not necessarily conscious or perverse ‘misreadings’: as mentioned earlier, ‘what we feel might be dependent on past interpretations that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 171). Affective responses tend to ‘travel along already defined lines of cultural investment’ (Pedwell and Whitehead Reference Pedwell and Whitehead2012: 123) and some subjects – such as women and Black people – have become so ‘over-associated with affect’ that they become the objectified targets of other people’s affective responses (Hemmings Reference Hemmings2005: 561).

In what follows, I explore two modes of artistic intervention: challenging stereotypes and working with communities. For each modality I look at key examples, exploring the affective dimensions that are generated with this type of artistic intervention and the affects that circulate between bodies and minds; these can be channelled to strengthen anti-racism, but that might also create potentially problematic effects, which are not necessarily avoidable but need to be seen as coming with the territory.

Challenging Stereotypes

The stereotype is a simplified image of a category and its component members. While social psychology and studies of human cognition recognise that simplification is a normal part of human categorisation processes, the stereotype has come to mean a preconceived, over-generalised and over-simplified image of a person, situation or thing, which attributes to every instance of a given category the same simple and essential characteristics and thus acts to distort a more complex reality. A stereotype can be a source of bias or prejudice in that it can affect how people behave towards others, whom they expect to align with the stereotypes they hold about them; and how people comport themselves in relation to stereotypes they assume exist about them (a phenomenon known as stereotype threat).

Stereotypes are key components of entire worldviews, deeply embedded in our cognitive systems. When stereotypes are racialised, they act as fundamental and interconnected nodes that bring together elements of a whole regime of representation that supports racialised hierarchies and legitimates discrimination, inequality, violence and, ultimately, death. These images reproduce schemas for thinking about racialised categories of people by orienting perceptions and behaviours in ways that tend to align with them. Importantly, the schemas are robust but not completely rigid: stereotypes can survive multiple ‘exceptions’, because individual instances are not simply either in or out of a given category, they are more or less close to the prototypical exemplar of it (Hinton Reference Hinton2000).

Challenging racialised stereotypes that reproduce the unequal position of subaltern groups and legitimate violence against them is thus a vital strategy in anti-racism, which has effects at many levels, symbolic and material, and in terms of impacting on issues of recognition and redistribution, and of stigmatisation and discrimination. Such challenges not only help to counter the false conceptions and unwarranted, prejudicial assumptions that generate indignation, pain, anger and death among those they stereotype, they also work to affirm the legitimate presence and value of racialised subaltern groups in the society; they combat invisibility and silencing, and thus also strengthen a sense of identity and human worth, generating feelings of confidence and legitimacy.

It is useful to locate challenging stereotypes in terms of what Paula Serafini (Reference Serafini2022: 25–28) says are the five functions of art in the context of decolonial social movements and community organising against extractivism. She identifies denunciation (making visible but also establishing the legitimacy and relevance of what is made visible), documentation (literally, but also in terms of constructing narratives different from those of developmentalism), democratisation (sharing information and building community around these narratives), deconstruction (of dominant naturalised concepts, such as culture/nature, mind/body, feeling/reason), and design (creating new objects and new ways of being). Challenging stereotypes crosses several of these functions: in one sense, it is a form of denunciation, a protest at being misrepresented and stigmatised in ways that legitimate the violence that is often visited upon subaltern racialised people. An example could be contesting stereotypes of Indigenous people – or indios, to use the colonial term – as located in the past and in nature and thus as either irrelevant to extractivist projects or destined to be overcome – often with genocidal violence – by the projects’ modernist conquest of nature. Simple denunciation is necessary but limited. As Macarena Gómez-Barris (Reference Gómez-Barris2017: 3) says, ‘if we only track the purview of power’s destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalising viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and [that] finds forms of resisting and living alternatively’ – forms that would fall into Serafini’s ‘design’ category.

Challenging stereotypes is, however, also a form of deconstruction, in that it contests a dominant, taken-for-granted representation. And the challenge goes deeper still, towards design, because contesting an image of this kind generally involves creating a different narrative about what it means to be Indigenous in Latin America today. Disseminating the challenge also involves sharing that narrative and, potentially, mobilising people around it, while the challenge implicitly deconstructs nature/culture binaries and creates new objects (e.g. the ‘modern indio’) that point to new ways of being.

Nevertheless, as I have indicated, artistic anti-racism is never unidirectional, univalent or unambiguous. Contesting racist stereotypes in art practice appears to be a progressive and decolonial intervention, but it is haunted by the very racialised hierarchies and colonialities it sets out to challenge (cf. Stoler Reference Stoler2006). Lingering traces remain of the very racist stereotypes being challenged that have accumulated an affective baggage of meanings and past interpretations, which have ‘stuck’ to them (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 11) and traces of which (re-)activate as the artwork circulates and gains agency in different articulations and arrangements of relational networks of people, objects and ideas. Ann Stoler uses the concept of recursion to get at the way regimes of governance and discourse – in her case, colonial/imperial ones – are not erased by regimes that appear to displace them: elements of the old are reworked and redeployed in new ways to achieve some of the same effects through ‘processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations’ (Stoler Reference Stoler2016: 27). Christen Smith, trying to grasp the contradictions of ‘Afro-paradise’ in Bahia, Brazil, where Black bodies are celebrated as part of Brazilian culture while also being subjected to genocidal violence, points at the same phenomenon when she suggests it is necessary to read Bahia as a palimpsest, in which, according to Achille Mbembe, time ‘is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones’ (cited in Smith Reference Smith2016a: 63). Amade M’charek refers to the same phenomenon when she says that an effect of what she calls ‘folding time’ is that ‘history can be recalled in objects. History is never left behind’ (M’charek Reference M’charek2014: 31).

These palimpsestual, recuperated, enfolded traces can linger and remain active in different ways. One is that challenging stereotypes often involves giving some visual space and airtime to the stereotype itself, usually with some parodic or satirical intent, perhaps using grotesque exaggeration – as in the controversial work of US Black artist Kara Walker or the early work of Afro-Colombian artist Liliana Angulo Cortés, which focus on the Black body (I will return to this in what follows). Another way of lingering or haunting is when there is a simple inversion of existing meanings, resignifying a trait that is negatively valued in racist hierarchies by giving it a positive value. For example, Mara Viveros Vigoya (Reference Viveros Vigoya2002) found that some Black men in Colombia had appropriated racist stereotypes of them as over-sexed and recast them in a positive way to suggest they were sexually attractive. Similarly, Moreno Figueroa (Reference Moreno Figueroa2024) argues that some Black women in Mexico’s Costa Chica region supported what could easily be seen as photographic sexualised objectifications of them, because the images made them feel good and represented. Joane Nagel (Reference Nagel2003: 121–124) argues that the Black Power movement in the US resignified racist images of Black men as violent to convey meanings of a virile masculinity ready to defend family and community. Astrid Ulloa (Reference Ulloa2005) shows that some Indigenous movements coincide with state discourses in promoting images of Indigenous people as close to nature and thus as ecologically-minded guardians of the environment; but being ‘close to nature’ is also readable as being ‘uncivilised’. These resignifications are important but they also provide affordances that allow existing elements of the original stereotype to operate in a racist way in the context of networks of dominant representations.

Haunting and lingering traces can remain even when stereotypes are challenged by constructing new images – for example, the technologically savvy Indigenous person, the urban Indigenous person, the Black professional, the Black woman with a ‘natural’ Afro hairstyle – which defy the existing regime of racial representation and its hierarchy of values by creating new contradictory elements. But we should not underestimate the power of partial reinscriptions and recuperations, in which past patterns of interpretation made by others are not displaced but recursively reactivated.Footnote ³ The affordances provided by artworks are inherently relational – they emerge in relation to agents who use them in the world in various ways (Keane Reference Keane2018). As such, the effects that artists’ works produce in the world can be multiple and uncontrollable. To be sure, it may be obvious to artists that they cannot control how other people view their work. It may be less obvious how deeply rooted the effects of haunting and recursion are and especially how contradictory effects can coexist, perhaps even within the same person.

It is also worth noting that, in art practice, the challenging of stereotypes is quite often done within the institutional structures of the mainstream art world and its audiences and markets, even if the challenge is disruptive or not condoned by the institution. This, of course, is in large part the whole point of the challenge: the dominant institutions and norms have to be tackled head on. Insofar as these dominant institutions and structures are fertile locations for recursions of coloniality, the risks of haunting are ever present.

Let us explore an example in which this modality of anti-racism is clearly in play. Several paintings by Brazilian Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa challenge the stereotypical and constraining image of the Indigenous person as tied to the past, to rurality and to primitiveness (Sá and Milanez Pereira Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020).Footnote ⁴ A series of his prize-winning works from 2018 show prototypical índios, identifiable as such by their body paint, dress and bead adornments, using video cameras, mobile phones, computers and sound systems (see Figure 7.1).Footnote ⁵

Figure 7.1 Cunhatain, antropofagia musical (Cunhatain, Musical Anthropophagy) by Denilson Baniwa, Reference Baniwa2018

(© Denilson Baniwa, by permission).

These paintings engage with dominant images of Indigenous people in Brazil as constantly on the edge of extinction and death, relegated to oblivion by forces of coloniality that combine elements of settler and extractivist colonialism (Pacheco de Oliveira Reference Pacheco de Oliveira2016: ch. 2). Western visions of progress and modernity are founded on a notion of the past as something to be transcended, but also as a reservoir of nostalgia, a past that Indigenous peoples are held to embody. Denilson’s paintings could be seen as tapping into an Indigenous futurism that, like the work of some North American Indigenous artists, ‘urges the viewer to imagine Indigenous futures’ (Baudemann Reference Baudemann2016: 118). But Denilson’s work urges the viewer to see these images as part of the present too. The paintings play with time via what Grace Dillon (Reference Dillon and Dillon2012: 3) characterises as ‘Native slipstream’, which ‘views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream’. Denilson works between el indio permitido (the permissible indio) – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s term for the Indigenous figure seen as acceptable by the dominant classes (Hale Reference Hale2004) and which elicits in them affective forces of nostalgia, pity and joy – and what might be called the indio inconforme (rebellious, challenging, otherwise-minded), which often elicits responses of anger, fear and contempt from elites.

These images should be seen in the context of other pieces of Denilson’s work, such as his video Colheita maldita (Accursed Harvest, 2022), which likens agro-industrial landscapes to a horror film in which we are all trapped, and his performances as a pajé-onça (shaman-jaguar), in which he walks through modernist landscapes (city avenues, art galleries), producing spatial and temporal dislocations and an embodied critique of modernity.Footnote ⁶ Denilson brings together challenges to racist stereotypes and a whole political ecology and ontology to suggest ways of being Indigenous that are urgently relevant to the present and the future.

All these images and performances foreground in one way or another the figure of the índio. Of course, this figure is haunted by racist meanings and emotions and my argument is that these can be reactivated as the images circulate. We should recall that mainstream Western society is familiar with images that mix ‘the primitive’ (often in the figure of the Indigenous person) and ‘the modern’ (often represented by technology). Michael Taussig (Reference Taussig1993) argues that modern Western civilisation has long used the indio and his/her supposed fascination with technologies – such as phonographs – to attest to the wizardry of Western technologies that Westerners value so highly but also come to see as routine and second nature. With his/her apparent fascination, the indio, seen as close to nature, can vouch for the natural and life-like imitations produced by technologies such as record-players, tape recorders and cameras, which originally astonished Westerners before they became routinised.Footnote ⁷ Taussig contends that Westerners often laugh with pleasure and fascination at what they perceive as Indigenous people’s fascination with Western technology (Taussig Reference Taussig1993: 231).

Denilson’s paintings flirt with this primitivist tradition in complex ways. The paintings depict Indigenous people as prototypical índios – mostly wearing traditional clothing and body paint – but there is little amazement in the way the people in the paintings handle the technological devices; on the contrary they appears as a routine items. For the non-Indigenous viewer – who is arguably the intended audience addressed by the gaze of the subject in the painting – this creates a contradictory effect. There is something familiar and yet unfamiliar about the image; something easily assimilable to a primitivist perspective, yet also profoundly unsettling of it. There is a matter-of-factness about the way technology features in these paintings that, for the non-Indigenous viewer, is at odds with the very traditional depiction of the Indigenous subjects and their surroundings. Both the stereotype of the forest-dwelling Indigenous person and images of the Indigenous person ‘fascinated’ by the wonders of modern technology fit neatly into the dominant racial formation and thus generate a sense of frustration and anger for some Indigenous people.

Appropriating cameras for political ends, as documented by Terry Turner (Reference Turner1992) for the Kayapó (see Chapter 5), can channel these sentiments into a fight for justice, but making the technology everyday – as the Kayapó also do when they use cameras in their village-based ritual ceremonies, as opposed to their encounters with the state – creates a different affective response; it generates a sense of radical equality by showing that the same technology is ‘at home’ in quite different surroundings. Denilson’s paintings create a sense of both radical (Indigenous) alterity and radical (technological) sameness. The Indigenous person lives a life that is quite different in some respects from the lives of non-Indigenous people, yet in other respects their relationship to technological modernity is the same – both categories of people are fully at home with technologies, which are experienced as routine.

Despite these complexities, however, I argue that these paintings remain haunted by the affordances they provide for traces of primitivist racism. This is due to the double effect of a key component of the images, on which they depend for their effect, which is the classic depiction of the índio as semi-naked and wearing body-paint and beads. These elements remain key indicators of Indigenous status in Brazil.Footnote ⁸ For Indigenous people, they are part of everyday life, spiritual relationships and aesthetics, but they are also important in the way they present themselves to the state, during protests and negotiations, and in the public political sphere in general (e.g. in street marches). As in Denilson’s paintings, these indicators make the claim that it is possible to be ‘Indigenous’ in this way and also be an active part of today’s mainstream society. But the effect can also be to reinforce a primitivist view of Indigenous people; the images allow the possibility of a colonial romantic reading of traditional índios fascinated by a modernity that is beyond their ken. This reading is not entailed by the image: the point is that images circulate in multiple assemblages of people, objects and meanings. People will read the image in ways mediated by diverse connections with other agents and discourses. But the possibility of the colonial recursion exists. It is a catch-22 situation caused by the agency of the artwork in a relational network.

A further example of this complex ambivalence is in the work of the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro. The company is directed by Black Colombian Rafael Palacios and includes dancers who are all Black in Colombian terms (negro or afro) and self-identify as such.Footnote ⁹ The terrain of dance is a complex and contradictory one for challenging racism directed at Black people, because dance (and music) are so deeply embedded in the hierarchies of the racial formations involving Blackness. From colonial times, music and dance have been a field in which dynamics of control, subjugation, assimilation, co-optation, appropriation and resistance have played out (Birenbaum Quintero Reference Birenbaum Quintero2019; Feldman Reference Feldman2006; Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993; Radano and Bohlman Reference Radano and Bohlman2000; Wade Reference Wade2000).Footnote ¹⁰ This means that dance or music identified as ‘Black’ or ‘Afro’ – whether identified as such by performer or audience – can always signify varied things and mobilise contradictory affective forces, such as indignant disgust and (sexualised) pleasure (e.g. by white audiences both decrying and enjoying music they associate with Blackness), admiration and envy (e.g. by white musicians and dancers competing with the supposedly ‘natural’ talents they often ascribe to Black performers), and despair and pride (e.g. by Black performers facing racism and mobilising against it).

In terms of racism and anti-racism, Black dance and music – and the Black bodies with which they are closely connected – are highly ambivalent spaces, with the potential to both foster and subvert racism in complex ways. As artist Liliana Angulo says in reference to her art installation Négritude (2007), which featured a soundtrack of Latin American songs that referred to the figure of el negro (the Black man), ‘the songs of Afro-Caribbean genres chosen [for the installation] express many of the ideas and imaginaries promoted by the thinkers of the Négritude movement [that began in the 1930s] and they also display many of the stereotypes of racism. It is not something Black and white, because no one in our countries is Black or white.’ The fact that these musical styles are ‘directed at the body, at enjoyment, at celebration and sensuality’ could make them subject to ‘being co-opted as stereotype’; on the other hand, this does not detract from their power to be fundamental cultural practices that can also be ‘revolutionary, liberatory, challenging, insolent, etc.’ (cited in Giraldo Escobar Reference Giraldo Escobar2014: 151, my translation).

Similar ambivalences have been evident in other representations focusing on Black bodies. Kobena Mercer, for example, contends that the images of white photographer Robert Mapplethorpe from the 1980s, which sexualise Black male bodies, reiterate ‘the terms of colonial fantasy’ and thus ‘service the expectations of white desire’. But while ‘colonial fantasy attempts to “fix” the position of the black subject into a space that mirrors the object of white desires’, Black readers ‘may appropriate pleasures by reading against the grain, overturning signs of otherness into signifiers of identity’ (Mercer Reference Mercer1994: 134–136). Nearly forty years later, the same ambivalence inhabits the queer Black art of the late Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. A commentator writes: ‘Despite being black and insisting his art does not pander to the same stereotypes as Mapplethorpe’s, his work is unable to circumvent these stereotypes entirely.’ The writer recognises that this is because the power of interpretation lies with the viewer, but still hopefully concludes that, despite this, Fani-Kayode’s photographs ‘retain subversive potential because both he and the men in his photographs possess subjectivity’ (Muldoon Reference Muldoon2020). I think the point is that the subversive potential and the inability to circumvent stereotyped readings are both available routes that can be traced in overlapping but different networks.

The controversies surrounding the work of US Black artist Kara Walker traverse the same terrain. While many commentators contend that her work ultimately undermines the stereotyped images of Black people she consistently deploys in scenarios commonly featuring racial and sexual violence (Neary Reference Neary2015; Seidl Reference Seidl2009; Shaw Reference Shaw2004), others say she does not offer a clear resolution (Schollaert Reference Schollaert2014) and fellow African American artist, Betye Saar, who has also worked with stereotyped images of Black women, protested publicly that Walker’s art ‘was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment’ (PBS 2000). Walker herself says ‘One theme in my artwork is the idea that a Black subject in the present tense is a container for specific pathologies from the past and is continually growing and feeding off those maladies’ (cited in Neary Reference Neary2015: 160). This resonates with the recursiveness of the past that I wish to highlight. In this respect, Janet Neary comments that, once Walker produces an artwork, ‘she does not have control over her production’: her work ‘identifies, but cannot fully control or inoculate against, the workings of racial terror’ (Neary Reference Neary2015: 160).

I argue that this kind of ambivalence can be seen in Sankofa Danzafro’s fifty-minute production La ciudad de los otros (The City of the Others, 2010). The dance starts with music that has a rolling drum-heavy beat, with rhythmic horn riffs and vocals that combine rapping and chanting; the choreography suggests a dance party, including a male-female pair close-dancing with synchronised hip action, and featuring a street-style dance-off between competing crews, overlain by a chanting rap vocal; a solo clarinet comes in with melodies suggestive of musical styles (bullerengue, cumbia, chirimía) from Colombia’s historically Black coastal regions (see Figure 7.2). For audiences in Colombia and elsewhere in the Americas, this all evokes a sense of ludic Blackness. The next scene shows people strap-hanging in a bus or train, while a solo voice sings over a drum, known in Black regions of Colombia as a tambor alegre or conuno, which plays a fairly complex rhythm. This segues into several minutes of an energetic solo male dancer interacting with the drummer, ignored by the other ‘passengers’ who are now seated on chairs. A change is marked when another drum, the llamador in Colombian Caribbean regional terminology, starts playing a single beat under the tambor alegre, joined by a guasá or shaker, which together provide the rhythm for a male-female couple dance that is clearly a traditional dance from the region (in this case a bullerengue, although the non-specialist might identify it as the better-known cumbia), a cultural reference reinforced by the appearance, towards the end of this segment, of the unmistakable flauta de millo (cane flute) of the Caribbean coastal region.

Figure 7.2 An early scene from Sankofa Danzafro’s La ciudad de los otros, Battery Dance Festival, New York, 2015

(photo by Steven Pisano, © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

At this stage, the instruments and much of the music are clearly rooted in the musical traditions of the coastal regions, although the opening dance party scene and the solo male dance interlude introduce a more urban and ‘contemporary’ dance element that is still recognisably ‘Black’ for the audience. Meanwhile, the suggestion of an urban transport system and the fact that all the dancers, male and female, wear smart-casual trousers, long-sleeved shirts and ties both contradict the sense of a ‘folkloric’ performance and frame these traditional elements as, perhaps, cultural oases or memories for Black people living in city environments that they experience as belonging to ‘others’. Nevertheless, some basic connections between Black bodies, drum-heavy rhythms and ludic, sensual and energetic dance moves are reiterated throughout.

The performance then moves off into diverse scenes that do not reiterate these familiar connections. One sequence of almost ten minutes has a peaceful feel, with music dominated by the sounds of harp and piano, and bodies moving in synchronised waves, with hands and arms that reach out and stroke. Subsequent scenes evoke urban life and are accompanied by frenetic, rhythmic, metallic electronic music, which at times develops into alarming stress-inducing noises overlying bodies that twist and convulse, struggle and drown, collapse and revive. The overwhelming impression is of people confronting hostile urban/industrial environments, being shut in, going mad, being distraught, arguing, being assaulted, and being observed and checked up on. This aligns with Sankofa Danzafro’s own description of the performance, which says that it ‘reveals the lack of opportunities for human beings who for generations have been marked by ethnic discrimination and social inequity’. There are also impressions of resisting and defying, expressing oneself individually and freely, interacting collaboratively and in a friendly way with others. There are moments when each dancer has a solo dance break in an enclosed space defined by three 2.5 × 1 metre boards, suggesting confinement, each of which ends with a defiant gesture that says something like, ‘This is who I am.’ There are other moments when people dance in groups of three or four or all in unison, working together, lifting and supporting each other (see Figure 7.3). This reflects the official description’s statement that ‘Black and other marginalised communities, always observed through the same lens, demand political power that results in authentic forms of coexistence.’Footnote ¹¹

Figure 7.3 A later scene from Sankofa Danzafro’s La ciudad de los otros, Battery Dance Festival, 2015

(photo by Steven Pisano, © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

The overall effect with regard to stereotypes of Blackness is ambivalent. The use of music and dance as a medium to express a positive message about Blackness will inevitably be obliged to navigate existing negative and restrictive stereotypes about Blackness. As noted, some fundamental and familiar affective connections between Black bodily dexterity and elasticity in dance, drum-heavy rhythmicity, and playfulness and sensuality are reproduced in the performance. This resonates with some powerful stereotypes about Black people that are deeply rooted in the hierarchies of coloniality, and which trivialise, sexualise and animalise them. In addition, some stereotypical associations specific to Colombia are also reiterated, linking Blackness to the coastal regions and to traditional ‘folkloric’ musical styles such as bullerengue or cumbia.

On the other hand, a great deal of the performance, while it necessarily connects Black bodies to dance and music, addresses themes that break with familiar stereotypes, at least in the Colombian context. Harp and piano music, for example, are not associated with Blackness in Colombia. A more important break is the portrayal of urban Blackness, as, in Colombia, Blackness is typically associated with peripheral rural regions, despite a long history of Black settlement in cities. (This would be less relevant for US or European contexts, where Blackness is stereotypically more urban.) In addition, showcasing in visible and audible terms the trauma and alienation affecting Black people – in short, highlighting racism – challenges traditional images of Colombia as a racially tolerant social formation in which racialised difference is not considered important. The performance makes a case for Black solidarity and cultural specificity – rooted, for example, in traditional music and dance – as a resource for dealing with exclusion, rather than just a resource for the cultural diversity of the nation, defined in the dominant imaginary as an inclusive polity.

Ultimately, foregrounding Black bodies as vectors for anti-racism and decoloniality is inherently an ambivalent strategy (Moreno Figueroa Reference Moreno Figueroa2024; Ruette-Orihuela Reference Ruette-Orihuela, Figueroa and Wade2022). Brazilian Black feminist Beatriz Nascimento noted that ‘slavery is present in our bodies, our blood and our veins’ (cited in Smith Reference Smith2016b: 81) and the fact that enslavement restricted Black people to their sheer physicality is one reason why she privileged the body ‘as a political site’ and insisted that ‘the quest for Black autonomous space is located first in the corporeality of the body’, that ‘the body is the territorialization of memory’ and that the quilombo – as physical and symbolic space – ‘is the transmigration of the Black body from the senzala (slave quarters) to autonomy’ (Smith Reference Smith2016b: 80, 82).Footnote ¹² Yet this journey is haunted by traces of coloniality and its racist stereotypes of the Black body, reduced to a negro permitido – or more frequently a negra permitida (permissible Black woman) (Rahier Reference Rahier2014: 146) – that is, a body for sensual consumption by others.

It is interesting that Liliana Angulo, reflecting back on her work from the early 2000s, which played with stereotyped images of Black people using hyperbole, caricature, parody and satire (see Giraldo Escobar Reference Giraldo Escobar2014), commented that, for her in 2018, ‘stereotypes are no longer a preoccupation’ (Valoyes Villa Reference Valoyes Villa2018).Footnote ¹³ In an online conversation in 2020, she observed:

Since then, Liliana Angulo has moved in other directions, including working with local communities.Footnote ¹⁵ In the next section, I argue that this kind of work may offer different affordances that sidestep some of the ambivalences and hauntings that working with stereotypes involves – although working with communities presents its own challenges.

Working with Communities

This modality of anti-racist artistic practice involves working with people who occupy the lower rungs of racialised hierarchies. This work seeks to affirm presence, combat invisibility and silencing, strengthen identity, and support local struggles for justice and equality. This mode of practice may also aim to build capacity in the communities, both by giving people specific skills and by increasing general self-esteem and confidence.

Regarding the affective dimension of this modality, we can see that racism produces feelings of isolation and alienation among those who experience its negative impacts. If one effect of racism is to produce the internalisation of racialised value hierarchies, this effect is exacerbated to the extent that a person feels they are on their own in dealing with the demeaning judgements they have internalised. Recognising and feeling the collective nature of the experience helps people to grasp the structural character of the oppression they face (Pyke Reference Pyke2010); working with and interacting with neighbours around issues of racialised difference and identity, especially in a creative setting, can generate feelings of solidarity and connection and of aspiration and hope, all of which can be channelled into anti-racist struggles.

These struggles are frequently intersectional, insofar as people do not ‘live single-issue lives’ (Lorde Reference Lorde1984: 138) and thus, in practice, they find it meaningful to challenge issues around racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism – among other -isms – in ways that acknowledge their connectedness. In particular, racism and classism in Latin America are very closely interwoven, given that in most areas of the region, the spectrums of racialised and class difference tend to coincide strongly (Telles and Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America Reference Telles2014), which is different from the United States and Europe, where the lower strata are majority white. The congruence of racial and class hierarchies in Latin America is important for the effects and affects produced by anti-racist art practices in the community.

An example of this modality is the work that Sankofa Danzafro – the same group discussed in the previous section – did over a four-month period in 2020 with young people, mostly but not uniformly Black, in the working-class communities of Medellín. Within the framework of the Red de Danza de Medellín (Medellín Dance Network), organised by the mayor’s office in association with a local university and several cultural organisations, Sankofa Danzafro organised neighbourhood dance ‘laboratories’ to deliver training, some of it virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with Sankofa, Carlos Correa organised the production of a video showcasing the process, which consisted of Sankofa Danzafro members training groups of young people, who then presented short dance routines.Footnote ¹⁶

The video shows excerpts of the young people’s performances and extracts of interviews with them and the Sankofa dancers. These interviews are short and the context tended to elicit positive statements, but it is clear that the process and, especially, the focus on dance, generated powerful feelings of community. One boy said, ‘I like to dance because of the way I am, to make more friends, create companionship.’ Another said ‘It is important to dance in the neighbourhood, in the community, to rescue young people and rescue others too.’ A dancer-instructor said that the end result of the process was ‘a work that the children had achieved, in which they managed to join together, seeking the companionship and the family that we always try to find in these processes’. The mother of one girl valued the positive forces the work generated as a counter to forces undermining community. She identified these forces as ‘vices’ and the COVID-19 pandemic. First: ‘It is no secret that we live in vulnerable communities … where there’s a lot of – let’s call them vices, other alternatives to choose.’ Second: ‘The hardest thing we had to face was virtuality: if it wasn’t the internet, it was the children who couldn’t be together because maybe they didn’t have a cell phone or a computer.’ In the face of this, she said that, for the children in the project, it was ‘beautiful to be able to participate, be able to dance, be able to live and be able to enjoy themselves day by day and feel they are just children’.

Although the word ‘racism’ did not appear in the video, the trainers saw this community-building as closely linked to Black identity and resilience. One said: ‘We address the theme of identity with the children, which is also a question … that everyone has about how they are seen and how society sees them; and what are the stereotypes that exist in society … about us, and that damage us physically and psychologically.’ Another noted that the young people already had a reservoir of embodied knowledge about dance from their own experiences and that building on this was facilitated because their knowledge had ‘a lot of affinity with Afro-contemporary dance techniques: there are many movements that are similar. So we make a connection there.’

In terms of the dancing itself, a key feature was the location of the routines in ordinary cityscapes, such as pavements, the open concrete plaza surrounding a local cultural and sports centre, the occasional green space squeezed in among the roads and houses, and small playgrounds. In these spaces, to the ubiquitous sound of drum rhythms, young people performed energetic and dynamic dance routines in public, sometimes as buses, cars and trucks roared past at arm’s length (see Figure 7.4). The drums, the movements and the bodies of the people together constituted a clear assertion of Blackness in the public space of the city – which, it is important to say, is the capital city of a region that is little associated with Blackness and that has a historical reputation for being racist (Wade Reference Wade1993). Together the dancers, drummers and instructors used sound and body movements to intervene collectively in the affective history of the city of Medellín, adding a dimension in which Black people occupy everyday public spaces – beyond theatres and art galleries – transforming them temporarily, and challenging the long-standing racist views that cast Blackness as uncivilised and thus marginal in a city widely perceived as a beacon of modernity and whiteness.

Figure 7.4 Scene from Muestra final: Laboratorios de creación en casa, video, 2020

(from video by Lethal Peligrosos Producciones, © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

Spatial arrangements are an expression of, and a means to enact, power relations, involving both control and resistance (Gregory and Urry Reference Gregory and Urry1985; Massey Reference Massey2005). Where racial difference is imbricated with power relations, spatial structures will necessarily be racialised and racial hierarchies will necessarily be spatialised (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz2007; McKittrick and Woods Reference McKittrick and Adrian Woods2007; Neely and Samura Reference Neely and Samura2011; Wade Reference Wade2020). Space can be seen as ‘an active archive of the social processes and social relationships composing racial orders’, active in the sense that spatial structures are not just a static representation of the racial order, but, via the located activities of people, actively participate in the construction of that order as a material-semiotic assemblage (Knowles Reference Knowles2003: 83). As an archive, racialised spaces can be sites for control and for resistance and autonomy; as with the discursive realm of stereotypes, processes of recursion mean that spaces can be haunted by traces of coloniality that remain active (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2011). But working with communities creates a distributed form of agency that is different from the stereotype-challenging art object, which, although it creates effects and affects in a relational way as it circulates, is more likely to become an object with a life of its own, which can provide affordances for racist readings that are locked into a recursive binary of representations – racist versus anti-racist.

What we see in this video is a vivacious performance of affective intensities that goes beyond the simple representation of identity framed by a binary of hegemony and resistance. It would be possible to see the urban spaces and their temporality as being hegemonic structures that are defied by Black bodies dancing in resistance. But this binary framing does not grasp the everyday, habitual inhabiting of these spaces and temporalities by the dancers, along with their families, friends and neighbours, of which the dance performances themselves are just a snippet. Importantly, we also see beyond the performances to glimpse some of the community networks in which they are embedded: we see families, we see dancers talking about how dance fits into their everyday lives and provides them with support, we see the instructors talking about how they make connections with the young dancers.

Together, the dancing and the music, the bodies in motion, synchronised with each other and the drummers, while also being embedded in everyday relationships in the community, create affective intensities in space and time to suggest that urban places can also be scenarios for living as a Black person in the city – alongside non-Black others. This is not a romantic invocation of the organic community: the idea of distributed agency does not depend on the idea of individuals coming together as one. Rather, it is a scenario of events involving bodies and objects that relate to each other in diverse ways and with diverse affective experiences, according to the event in question – whether it is a dance performance or rehearsal, a street football match, a neighbourly visit or conflict, a school class or queuing in a local shop. Doing artistic work in communities may bring people together around a specific event, but this cannot be separated from other events in which they are also involved together and which produce bodily reactions and investments that are not reducible to simple categories and oppositions (Thrift Reference Thrift2004: 71). Community-based work tends to foreground that people do not live single-issue lives: they encounter each other in the multi-stranded complexity of their everyday living.

The importance of this can be seen if we think back to the issue of stereotypes. To some extent, the same problems of haunting and recursion exist for community-based work as for the modality of challenging stereotypes. For example, people who operate with the racist assumptions that Black people are naturally good dancers or that they spend too much time dancing and not enough time working might be reassured in these assumptions on catching sight of a Sankofa Danzafro dance lab performance on the street. This potential problem exists, but I think that, in specific contexts, community-based interventions are well placed to sidestep them. To start with, these interventions, while they may be funded by institutions (e.g. local government, NGOs), often work outside the institutional spaces of the art world (theatres, museums, galleries, etc.) where the hauntings and recursions of coloniality may be powerfully felt. The way such interventions diffuse through the community, becoming imbricated with everyday life and distributing agency across a wide network, means that stereotypes are rarely stand-alone objectifications: if a young Black person is a dancer, then they are also a neighbour, a friend, a school colleague, a sports team-mate and so on. In a barrio in Medellín (and in other Latin American cities), such links are also likely to cross clearly racialised differences, mitigating the reification of racialised identities and attendant issues of exclusiveness and divisiveness, which otherwise hamper collaborations and solidarities that intersect boundaries of difference. The community focus brings out that people have multi-faceted lives, rather than just being the embodiment of a certain stereotyped image.

Just as the challenging of stereotypes does battle with haunting and recursion, so community-focused strategies face other rough patches on the field of anti-racist struggle that come with the territory and have to be negotiated. There are pitfalls of tokenism and co-optation: material support given by the city authorities for this kind of community-building intervention can entail limitations on autonomy, especially if the interventions are explicitly about reaffirming Blackness and thus readable as exceeding the bounds of el negro permitido – for example, by appearing to be not inclusive enough and even ‘racist in reverse’. However, by virtue of the distributed agency that attends community-based endeavours, this kind of art practice, especially in Latin American cities, can engage with people in an inclusive fashion, even if the topic is, for example, Afro-contemporary dance. But this in turn heralds another potential problem, which is that, precisely by virtue of distributing agency across racialised difference, there is the risk that the specific issue of racism might slide into the background and be overwhelmed by generalised images of marginalisation and disadvantage. There is a tricky balance to be achieved in terms of highlighting racism in an inclusive way. It may be that working with Afro dance (or other expressions of Blackness) in the community is a medium well suited to doing exactly that.

Conclusion

The two modes of anti-racist intervention through art that I have analysed are not mutually exclusive. They overlap and interweave in the work of specific artists and in specific interventions. Sankofa Danzafro’s work gives examples of challenging stereotypes and of working with communities. Liliana Angulo Cortés started working with stereotypes and has moved towards working collaboratively with communities and other artists in projects that highlight the work of Afro-Colombian artists who have been marginalised by the art institutions of Colombia. Like many other Indigenous artists in Brazil, Denilson’s work – of which the paintings I analysed are a small sample – is intimately connected to Indigenous communities. Within a single artistic intervention the same overlap occurs: the Sankofa Danzafro dance labs, which were an example of working in the community, also indirectly challenged stereotypes.

My argument has been that each mode puts into circulation affective forces in ways that have their own particular strengths and problems. I think that challenging stereotypes is a vital part of the decolonial and anti-racist struggle. I also think that this specific mode of intervention is perpetually haunted by the colonial and racist meanings of the very images it sets out to challenge. This is in part because of the recursive power of the structures and discourses of coloniality, which do not disappear but adapt and transform. And it is in part because of the way art objects circulate in relational networks, where the meanings that have accumulated through histories of coloniality and have stuck to the objects can be reactivated and recuperated in racist ways.

When artistic anti-racist practice foregrounds working with communities, the problem of haunting is less obvious. While the spaces in which the artists and communities work may be shaped by structures of coloniality (e.g. residential and job segregation along race–class lines), the racialised identities that emerge from the work tend to be less subject to objectification, because the agency of the artists and the art objects produced is distributed across a social network in the community that – especially in the context of Latin American cities – is heterogeneous and variegated. The affects that stick to these art objects as they circulate and create effects in the world are therefore likely to exceed the binary of racism versus anti-racism, while the racialised identities that are generated and their representations are also less subject to the hauntings that attend the art objects involved in challenging stereotypes. On the other hand, working with communities raises issues of co-optation by institutional forces and of how to stop the specificity of racism from slipping into the background.