Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean

We describe our ethnographic observations and personal experience about how Afro-Caribbean music and its musical videos profited from negative labelling to produce status and national identity in History. For doing this, we compare reggaetón actual experience with historical data about several musical genres, from the Inquisition to 20 th century. It is a story about how white and higher classes negative labelling on blackness could be used to find new forms of status. Do you like Latino dancing music? Take a sound system and enjoy this story.

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2021

Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregrounding how it reproduces Black erasure. I argue that “Latin America,” rather than being a geographical designator, is an imagined community that is Eurocentric to the degree that its conceptual boundaries exclude African diaspora spaces. I then turn to understandings of whiteness across borders, contrasting perceptions of racial mixture in the United States and the Hispanophone Americas. Lastly, I examine works by (Afro-)Latinx artists whose nuanced views on race demonstrate the potential of visual representation to provide insight into this complex topic beyond the black-white binary.

In this paper, we present the development of a communicative and pedagogical device that combines a performance intervention with participative workshops. The device thus designed stands at the crossroad between academic and artistic research and is intended to address ethnic-racial discrimination in school environments. Furthermore, it aims at fostering a critical attitude on the subject in high school students. One of the main goals of this project was to use performance as a methodological tool to investigate the Afro-Argentine legacy, seeking to activate latent perceptions and ideas related to this problem. We narrate here a concrete experience carried out in the EESO High School No. 518 "Carlos Fuentealba", located in one of the neighborhoods of Rosario city, Santa Fe, Argentina where the settlement of an important Qom population has resulted in conflictive situations as regards the construction of a cultural identity in a context of ethnic-racial discrimination. With this work we hope to contribute to the discussion about the ways scenic materials help to generate reflexivity on themes like racism, a problem that stands between public and private sphere, in historical and sociocultural processes characteristic of particular national contexts.

Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History. Kristina Wirtz. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 329 pp. Punk and Revolution: Seven More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality. Shane Greene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016. 235 pp. The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency. Morgan James Luker. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. 218 pp. Tigers of a Different Stripe: Performing Gender in Dominican Music. Sydney Hutchinson. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. 279 pp

American Ethnologist, 1995

In social theory, there is a tension between approaches which privilege practice and those focusing on discourse. Recently, such dualisms have been challenged, for example in the analysis of social movements, by perspectives which seek to overcome divisions between culture and politics. I argue that these challenges can be promoted by focusing on how culture as a human activity of working in the world, in which the material and the symbolic are unified, exists in tension with culture as a commodified object in the context of hegemonic constructions of culture which construct it as primarily a set of symbolic representations. I examine this theme in relation to the efforts of young blacks in the city of Cali, Colombia, who use rap music to make a cultural identity as a way of life, which also involves class issues in the urban environment, while at the same time they construct their culture as a object designed to move in circuits of consumer commities and, especially, state and NGO funding. The local state and the voluntary sector also work on culture as a more limited set of expressions, seeking to depoliticize it.

There has been extensive debate about the putative imperial dimensions of critical race studies in Latin America. The concern is that US racial discourses, identities and antiracist strategies are being incorrectly applied to, if not forced upon, Latin America. Those who disagree with this position, including ourselves, argue that it is legitimate to take insights and understandings gleaned in the USA as tools for understanding and challenging racism in Latin America. However, we also believe that the exchange of ideas regarding effective anti-racist strategies should flow in both directions. Therefore, in this article we change the direction of the traditional dialogue by discussing ways in which research in Latin America can inform the theoretical foundation of antiracism in other countries, such as the USA. Specifically, we discuss the implications of current strategies of race mixing, minimization of racial consciousness, colorblindness, multiculturalism and racism literacy for current theories of anti-racism.

Cultural Studies, 2018

This special issue examines and theorizes lasting and resurgent forms of racism after recognition and claims to decolonization in Latin America. It also analyses what the authors interpret as a retrenchment in indigenous and Afro-descendant rights. The authors argue that this shift is underpinned by factors including extractivism, aided by the ability of neoliberal multiculturalism to shape, weaken and co-opt popular movements, and launched by a backlash by elites in conjunction with actors from dominant groups rendered vulnerable by global capitalism, who have turned to populism and racial scapegoating as a reaction to increased precarity. The issue shows that the circumscription of indigenous and Afro-descendant rights manifests itself both in novel ways and as entrenched colonial practices and traditions. Moreover, the issue explores the cultures and geographies of extractivism, specifically as it relates to race and racism. The issue moves forward critiques of neoliberal multiculturalism by arguing for the need to challenge racist hierarchies instead of only focusing on difference, and by looking at discrimination and the rearticulation of racism in left leaning post-neoliberal regimes ostensibly committed to decolonizing reforms. The articles in this issue highlight the importance of interrogating cultures of power while also conducting sound ethnography at the margins. These strategies allow the authors to question the appropriation and ventriloquist use of ethnic markers and agendas by elites.

Hlasatel, 2017

A short popularization report of archaeological excavation in Záveská street in Prague-Hostivař, where a part of Late and Final Bronze Age settlement was uncovered.