This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

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 chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

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.

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.

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.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

Part II of the book opens with the first empirical chapter describing my dissertation research in Colombia. In the mid-2010s, I conducted a multiyear study of how young people in the country were thinking about peace and connecting it to their lives and identities. This chapter provides a contextualization – a key element of conceptualized peace – of the discourses and social representations related to peace as the Colombian government sought to end decades of armed conflict and build toward a broader harmonious society. The chapter summarizes the methods that involved integrating three datasets to provide multiple viewpoints and understand the context within which these participants were embedded. The young Colombians conveyed nuanced ideas about peace and themselves that related to these social representations, but also showed cognitive flexibility and local contextual influence as they made sense for themselves. I end the chapter by showing how conceptualized peace helps interpret the findings and adds overall value to the study and its implications.

The legal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ collective land rights is contentious in Colombia. There are enduring land disputes between state actors and Indigenous communities. Land rights policies have passed through several political cycles, but these have typically been poorly implemented, routinely violated by state actions, and often rolled back with new legislation. The 1991 National Political Constitution (NPC) transformed Indigenous-state relations, where for the first time in Colombia’s history, the collective cultural and land rights of Indigenous Peoples were recognized and protected in the country’s supreme law. To date, Indigenous Peoples have secured exclusive ownership rights to over 33 million hectares of collective lands, or 28 percent of the country. However, most Indigenous lands were titled before the 1991 NPC, which was constrained in its promise by a long-lasting internal armed conflict (among other factors). A 2016 historic Peace Agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas promised to address the root cause of the conflict: land ownership disputes. This agreement has yet to resolve the land problem. Taking a historical perspective, this chapter analyzes the structural political and legal barriers to Indigenous land rights in Colombia. The chapter examines the interaction of the Peace Agreement with land rights laws and explores the strategies of Indigenous Peoples to secure and safeguard their land rights in this new context. The chapter concludes with recommendations for strengthening land rights across the nation.

This opening chapter introduces the reader to the main focus of the book, as well as how the author came to study peace education and restorative justice. The book aims to more deeply integrate an understanding of how young people come to form ideas about themselves with how they make meaning of their socio-ecological contexts. Peace education and restorative justice are two fields where we can more deeply integrate psychology into the project of building more harmonious social worlds. The chapter ends by detailing how the rest of the book is organized. The chapters are structured under three sections. First are the backgrounds, definitions, and opportunities in each field. These are then integrated into a theoretical framework – conceptualized peace – with examples of studies to provide further definition. Finally, the book ends with methodological approaches to applying conceptualized peace and future directions.