This project investigates anti-racist practices and ideologies in Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project contributes to addressing problems of racism and racial inequality in the region and to shaping on-going debates there about how to conceptualise and label racism, anti-racism, discrimination and the idea of race.
Latin American countries present new opportunities for thinking about anti-racism and the role of race at a time when many claim that, at least in Europe and the United States, we have entered a ‘post-racial’ world, where anti-racism has apparently gone into ‘crisis’ and emerged as an often insipid and hard-to-defend multiculturalism.
We propose that the situation in Latin America will help to interrogate the concept of anti-racism and its cross-cultural applicability and diversity, and provide lessons of wider relevance to anti-racism generally: how should anti-racism be conceptualised, as part of a social justice agenda, when racial differences are blurred by race mixture and merge into cultural difference, and when victim and victimiser can be the same person?
If the world looks to some observers to be becoming post-racial, then by the same criteria, Latin America has been post-racial avant la lettre and thus provides a site to interrogate the concept of post-raciality and the place of anti-racism within it.
This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
