This chapter explores the theoretical themes of the book: art, politics and anti-racism; emotion and affect in art and politics; Latin American racial formations. It outlines the research project on which the book is based: Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA).

A conversation curated from an online event, Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World. Artists from different parts of Latin America talk about their work from a decolonial and anti-racist perspective. Participants include Miriam Álvarez, director of the Mapuche theatre company El Katango; Alejandra Ejido, director of the Afro-Argentine company Teatro en Sepia; Ashanti Dinah Orozco, Afro-Colombian poet and Afro-feminist activist; Rafael Palacios, founder and director of the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro; and Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa, Brazilian Indigenous visual artists.

The conversation draws on two texts by members of the art collective Identidad Marrón, which both explore how racialised subalterns can decolonise the art world and specifically museums. The first is a statement by visual artist Abril Caríssimo; the second is a text by Flora Alvarado y América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, reflecting on their experience of curating an exhibition titled Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?) for the public Palais de Glace museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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.

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.

This chapter traces the changing contours of police corruption in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the short lifespan of the Metropolitan Police force (2008–2016) and, in doing so, illustrates the utility of a comparative historical, embedded approach. Based on in-depth interviews with dozens of police officers, public officials, technical experts, and activists, I argue that seemingly contradictory accounts of the Metropolitan Police as “surprisingly clean” and “deeply corrupt” were, to some degree, both true. On the one hand, rank-and-file officers rarely engaged in bribery, extortion, or irregular patrols, all of which remained ubiquitous in other police forces. This outcome was driven by the unique organizational characteristics of the new force but also by the structural configuration of the field, in which the nationally controlled Argentine Federal Police (PFA) remained the dominant player. At the same time, there were credible allegations of illicit revenue extraction, illegal surveillance, and ties to organized crime among Metropolitan Police leaders who – unlike PFA bosses – were tied to the Buenos Aires city government. Given this structural configuration, corruption generated novel political effects, contributing to the Buenos Aires mayor’s successful bid for the presidency.

A framing case study examines a debt dispute between a Wall Street investor and Argentina that resulted in the seizure of an Argentine warship in Ghana. Then the chapter tackles the topic of upholding international law. The chapter discusses: (1) international legal enforcement, including major bodies, when these bodies refuse to rule, and access to non-state actors; (2) domestic legal enforcement, including jurisdiction and various forms of immunity; and (3) political enforcement via coercion and persuasion.

This chapter examines how narratives of corruption are mobilized by two very different political actors in Latin America: marginalized rural farmers and free-market think tank elites. We show that, for each group, corruption is both a central element of political discourse and a tool for shaping state–society relations and advancing particular interests. Their narratives serve to define the boundaries of corruption, interpret the state, and drive and justify political action within changing historical contexts – for Colombian farmers, a state that has become newly consequential to their lives; and for right-wing think tank elites, a left turn in regional politics. The comparison demonstrates that while each group uses similar narratives, their different social positions and networks shape the actions they take in response: Farmers rely on clientelist networks to access the few state resources left to them by elite corruption, while elites engage in a hegemonic struggle against leftist populism. Paradoxically, even while sharing a strikingly similar understanding of corruption, each group condemns the practices of the other as corrupt. This analysis underscores the ubiquity of corruption as a strategic and moralizing tool in Latin American politics.

During the 1930s, the Bank devised a plan to help prepare the nation for war. In contrast to the Treasury, the Cabinet, and the League of Nations, the Bank was the sole defender of exchange control, a policy that involved restrictions on conversions in and out of sterling. Its experts argued that the necessity of wartime finance, diplomatic tensions with France and the United States, and a potential flight from sterling at the outbreak of war all justified the reform of exchange-rate management. Although exchange control was primarily seen as an overly restrictive arrangement, often associated with authoritarian regimes in Germany or Argentina, the Bank’s advisers claimed to understand the technical requirements and the particular needs of a financial sector preparing for war. With its enactment in early 1939, the Bank had effectively abandoned its commitment to restoring the prewar liberal economic order and instead oversaw a new system of governance that continued well into the postwar years.

This chapter examines the literary registration of the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. It focuses on fictional representations of the contemporary soy frontier in Argentina and the former coal-mining districts of North East England. Specifically, the chapter considers Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2014), described by the author as Argentina’s first glyphosate novel, alongside Benjamin Myer’s Pig Iron (2012), which registers the socioecological fallout from the collapse of the coal frontier in County Durham. Placing both novels in the context of earlier depictions of the agricultural and industrial frontiers of Argentina and North East England, I show how, despite the very different geopolitical situations to which they respond, Schweblin’s and Myer’s narratives share certain thematic, stylistic, and formal likenesses in their mediation of the volatile and violent dynamics of commodity frontiers.