Afro-Latin American Studies

“Nos toca crear nuestras narrativas y la academia puede ayudar mucho.” That is how Alí Bantú Ashanti, Director del Colectivo de Justicia Racial (Colombia), defined our work. As scholars and members of the academy, he suggested, our main task is to create spaces and opportunities for Afrodescendant communities to share, disseminate and reflect on their own narratives. These opportunities represent a corrective intervention, a form of reparation in fact, for academia and education systems more broadly have been complicit in the silencing and invisibility of Afrodescendant communities and their narratives. As Susana Matute Charun, of the Dirección de Políticas para la Población Afroperuana del Ministerio de Cultura, stated, “Somos generaciones que no hemos tenido la oportunidad de conocernos en la escuela.”—”We are generations who have not had the opportunity of seeing ourselves in what we learned at school.” Racial inequality will not disappear unless we dismantle the knowledge systems that, for centuries, have sustained ideas of racial difference and racial stratification. We must transform “la escuela.”

Bantu Ashanti and Matute Charun were at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Harvard University, participating in the Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America, which we coordinated during the 2023-2024 academic year. Their presence there was no coincidence. The seminar was precisely a space for knowledge production that included voices like theirs and that sought to discuss stories, experiences, struggles and imaginaries that rarely find space in traditional academic courses and institutions. A good illustration of how the field of Afro-Latin American Studies is reimagining the region, the seminar examined contemporary struggles over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within long-term, historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification and political mobilization. In the seminar, we sought to recover political projects and efforts that have been historically rendered invisible in Latin America, and to explore how Africans and their descendants, from colonial times to the present, have envisioned such projects and struggled for their implementation. How should we conceptualize mobilization across time and across the region? What strategies, resources, and practices—from organized protest to the arts—comprise the repertoires of resistance and mobilization employed by Afrodescendant social movements in Latin America in pursuit of individual and collective rights and autonomy? Does any form of protest or resistance constitute “mobilization”? And how have states and elites responded to those efforts across time and space? What alternative understandings of territory and time emerge when we center African and Afrodescendant mobilization to rethink Latin America?

Sawyer Seminar with María Gabriela Pérez, Miriam Gomes, Lea Geler and Tomás Olivera Chirimini.

These questions illustrate the transformative potential of Afro-Latin American Studies. The field centers the experiences and contributions of Africans and their descendants and studies the processes of race-making, stratification and inequality that transformed them into negros and other “racial” groups. It reimagines Latin America from and through the visions, cultures and experiences of Africans and their descendants. It is a field that is characterized by at least three important epistemic interventions. 

First, it looks at African and Afrodescendant histories and contributions from multinational and transnational perspectives. Some of the key questions in the field, such as those related to the formation of national imaginaries, are inseparable from the nation state, from processes of nation making, and from their intersections with ideas of racial difference. For those questions, however, a multinational and comparative approach creates opportunities to identify variables, possibilities, actors and political projects that may not be visible through the study of a singular national experience. For example, one frequent topic of analysis and debate in our sessions concerned the proliferation of multicultural constitutional reforms across the region after the 1980s. All these cases were shaped by the actions and demands of various social movements, but a multinational approach immediately raises important questions concerning the timing and impact of those reforms, not to mention their absence in countries that are otherwise very different, such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic. How did social movements, some of which were fairly small, manage to effect changes of this sort? Why were they more effective in some countries than others? Which other factors do we need to consider? Here, a transnational approach, one that pays attention to the circulation of ideas, to the creation of international networks of activists, to the role of non-governmental organizations, and to the role of international organizations, provides answers that a national frame of reference may in fact obscure.

Second, this is and can only be a multidisciplinary field. The experiences, cultures, contributions, social lives and political efforts of Africans and their descendants cannot be encapsulated within a single discipline. Nor can racism and its multiple lives be understood and studied through the methodologies, theories and approaches of a singular discipline. Which discipline should study, to mention one concrete example analyzed in the seminar, the 2014 march to Bogotá of Afrodescendant women from several rural communities in the northern Cauca region known as “Mobilization of Black Women for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories”? Should this be the purview of gender scholars, given the centrality of Afrodescendant women in this particular effort? Of anthropologists, given that they came from rural communities? Of sociologists, given that such communities exist within entrenched patterns of regional inequalities? Of geographers, as we need to understand how the regions hosting those communities came to be conceptualized as such? Of political scientists, given that they made their demands to government authorities in the capital and one of their leaders, Francia Márquez Mina, became the vice-president of Colombia? Of scholars who privilege environmental questions, which shape in fundamental ways the lives of these communities? Or of those who study religions, which would give us access to locally produced cosmologies and understandings of their worlds? The complex questions that these communities, their histories, struggles, lives and cultures pose transcend the methodologies and theoretical musings of a single discipline. And it is perhaps important to remember the obvious: we are talking in many cases about actors and communities whose very existence has been ignored by traditional narratives of the nation and the state.

Third, and most importantly, this is a field in which knowledge is produced by a variety of people, including many who would not be considered primarily as scholars in the traditional, narrow sense of the term. Folks like Matute Charun, Bantú Ashanti and Márquez Mina, who also met with seminar participants during a visit to the Afro-Latin American Research Institute in October 2023. The field itself exists in response to the demands of activists and social movements, who have tirelessly pointed out that the creation of societies of inclusion requires new approaches to education and new curricula. This was, in fact, one of the central demands of the hundreds of activists who convened at the Regional Conference of the Americas against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Santiago de Chile in 2000. The conference’s final resolution issued what was in fact a call for the creation of a specialized field of Afro-Latin American Studies. It asked states “to encourage higher education institutions to include specific subject matter relating to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in appropriate courses.” The resolution also highlighted the need to radically reassess the historical contributions of Africa and Africans to world civilizations, not to mention Latin America, calling on states “to redress the marginalization of Africa’s contribution to world history and civilization by developing and implementing a specific and comprehensive program of research, education and mass communication to widely disseminate the truth about Africa’s seminal and valuable contribution to humanity.” The need for change in education was ratified by the International Decade for People of African Descent. Its first goal, re-cognition, requires the production of new knowledge, new approaches to learning, a reassessment of traditional narratives concerning colonialism, nation, race, culture and belonging. As the World Bank states in its report Afro-descendants in Latin America (2018), to achieve equity and the “social inclusion” of Afrodescendants, “the region must first understand and visualize [their] needs and agendas, reversing decades of policy and analytic neglect.” This is, precisely, what the field of Afro-Latin American Studies does.

Luis Reyes Escate and Susana Matute Charun.

Unlike Latin American Studies, a field that developed in the United States in the shadow of the geopolitical needs and anxieties associated with the Cold War, the field of Afro-Latin American Studies is an academic byproduct of Afrodescendant activism, of social struggles for inclusion, recognition and equality. Activists and public officials such as those we invited to the Sawyer Seminar are neither “informants” nor “sources.” They are knowledge producers who, through their initiatives and demands, generate new research questions and agendas, new lessons that are frequently anchored in experiences, memories and traditions that otherwise remain outside the traditional boundaries of academic production. We invited them to the seminar to learn with and from them, just as we invite faculty and students from other institutions. They entered the seminar space alongside and in conversation with the published scholarship we read, and together we rethought what we thought we knew and formulated new questions. It is a transformative pedagogical intervention, a dialogue between approaches, understandings and visions that opens new possibilities for research, teaching, and policymaking in which the university became a “resource” for, rather than a “source” of, knowledge-making. So, the “grande pergunta,” as Brazilian curator, activist and art educator Glaucea Helena de Britto commented in one of our sessions, is not only “quem conta [a] história.”  The issue here is that “a história” itself changes when we incorporate voices that come from spaces, traditions and communities that have traditionally existed beyond the halls of academia. “Quem conta” matters.

And it matters a great deal, to the point that these silenced, ignored stories may fundamentally alter dominant national narratives, like the alleged disappearance of Afrodescendant populations in countries such as Argentina and Peru. One of the books we read in the seminar, Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific, for example, reconstructs how different cultural actors intervened in the Peruvian “Black revival” that began in the 1950s through the recreation, perhaps invention, of “the forgotten music, dance, and poetry of Black Peru.” We devoted some attention to this question of how to interpret national forgetfulness, and to whether it was possible to find traces within the book, from the testimonies of Afrodescendants themselves, that might sustain alternative interpretations that operated on scales other than the “national.” The clues, it turned out, abounded. The two best-known exponents of this movement, Victoria and Nicomedes Santa Cruz Gamarra, came from “a family of Black intellectuals, artists, and musicians whose contributions to Peru’s cultural life went back six generations.” The members of the well-known group Perú Negro, created in the 1970s, “came from poor families in rural areas where Black music and dance had been preserved.” The author notes that black musical traditions had been “maintained by only a few families in the privacy of their homes or communities” and that in the 1960s, “a few elderly Black Peruvians remembered seeing the early-twentieth-century festejo danced.” (emphasis ours, not the author’s, Heidi Feldman). What would happen, then, if we were able to reconstruct this story from within those communities, those voices, those homes? Would we write about forgetting or would we rather tell a story of preservation and transmission against all odds? Again, “quem conta” matters.

Like the experience of re-reading a book in search of alternative interpretations, the field of Afro-Latin American Studies urges us to re-read and re-tell “a história” through a different lens. The clues to the presence and influence of Afrodescendants in Latin American societies are in fact everywhere, waiting to be re-cognized or known anew: nestled in regional and national archives, printed as testimonies in scholarly monographs, or “preserved” and “maintained” or “remembered” by members of Afrodescendant communities. If these traces and the stories to which they point have remained opaque, it is because many of those who told “a história” set an especially restrictive standard of visibility for Afrodescendants individually and collectively—they were unequal lives. 

Seeing, an earlier generation of stories suggested while narrowing the aperture, was believing. If against extreme odds, Afrodescendants could occasionally come into view, stepping onto the stage of national dramas in a handful of plots and starring roles, and if in doing so they could shed their cloak of invisibility as Afrodescendants, recognition and its rewards might be theirs. Otherwise, they were consigned to stories of victimization and debasement, or legends of erasure and disappearance—and as Alfonso Cassiani Herrera, a scholar and educator from the historic settlement of San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia), reminded us in his visit to our seminar, “las historias y leyendas se vuelven verdades académicas” —”stories and legends become academic truths.”

Francia Marquez at Sawyer Seminar October 19, 2023.

The field of Afro-Latin American studies is unsettling these “verdades académicas.” As knowledge producers within and beyond academia look to cases beyond their own city, region or nation, they find evidence of Afrodescendant experiences from other contexts that helps them puzzle out clues or frame new questions about their own, even in physical or social spaces where Afrodescendant presences were not visible. Thus armed, those who take up the challenge of surfacing Afro-Latin American stories and histories return to those traces, however faint, with the conviction that they are only the beginning of a much larger discovery. The existence of a robust field of Afro-Latin American studies, in other words, changes our way of seeing, and in so doing makes new vistas possible. If older official histories restricted us to “ver para creer,” “to see is to believe,” the field emboldens us to “creer para ver”–“to believe in order to see.” The question is no longer whether these clues will lead to any significant findings, but how to keep abreast of the rapidly expanding scope of the worlds they reveal.

The many barriers that have traditionally obscured these worlds are collapsing for another reason. The expansion of university systems and the creation of programs of affirmative action in countries such as Brazil and Colombia have created unprecedented opportunities for Afrodescendant and Indigenous scholars to access academia. Many of these scholars are producing intellectual work, at the highest level, from their own communities, bridging through their research and writing the gap that historically separated those communities from institutions of higher learning. There is, for example, a growing number of doctoral dissertations in many disciplines that are being produced by quilombola scholars, that is, by individuals who come from communities that have been historically black, poor and marginalized, communities historically linked to the resistance of runaway enslaved people. Those scholars write about local practices, traditions, struggles and contributions that were previously unknown to us. The work of one of the participants in the seminar, Gessiane Ambrósio Nazário, illustrates these points well. Nazário wrote her doctoral dissertation in education about her own community, the Comunidade Quilombola da Caveira, São Pedro da Aldeia, in Rio de Janeiro (now a book, Revolta do Cachimbo: A Luta Pela Terra no Quilombo da Caveira. Cabo Frio: Sophia Editora, 2022).

 The community’s struggles for land and resources, indeed the very history of the community as reconstructed by Nazário, do not easily conform—in fact, disrupt—broader narrative arcs of the nation state, suggesting alternative timelines and understandings of progress and modernity. The history of the region could be told, after all, through the logic of capital, of the Fazenda Campos Novos—where Nazário’s enslaved ancestors labored—and its picturesque 17th-century Jesuit church, which still stands and is a tourist attraction. The sort of alternative knowledge that these quilombola scholars produce breeds and sustains new forms of citizenship—or in Nazário’s words, “diferentes formas de existir”—in which understandings of rights and belonging are inseparable from histories of enslavement, blackness, violence and exclusion. During her presentation, Nazário discussed the activities of the Coletivo de Educação da CONAQ (Coordenação Nacional de Articulação de Quilombos), of which she is a founding member. She explained that teaching quilombola students “consciência histórica” requires shifting the narrative to “transformar vítimas de opressão em protagonistas da resistência capazes de efetuar mudanças.”  “É impossível,” she concluded, “consolidar a cidadania quilombola sem esse tipo de educação.” 

Francia Marquez at ALARI October 19, 2023.

Once the barriers to seeing and knowing begin to fall, the momentum is unstoppable. Indeed, in recent years, the production of knowledge from and about Afro-Latin America has grown exponentially. It seems that everywhere one looks, new Afro-Latin American stories are coming to light. In places like Brazil and the Caribbean, where Afrodescendant presences have long been visible to those telling “a história,” knowledge producers tell new stories by reframing the terms of visibility—as in Nazário’s centering of quilombola experiences and different forms of “existing.” In places where Afrodescendant presences were long rendered invisible or declared “disappeared,” like the Southern Cone, Central America and the Andes, doing this work also requires producing the visibility of Afrodescendants as Afrodescendants in the first place. The question of how to confront tensions between invisibility (through pressures toward cultural assimilation or the unmarking of ethnic or racial categories) and hyper-visibility (through racialization and stereotyping) is a pressing one in the field, as are the challenges of constructing anti-racist futures and imaginaries in the face of tenacious, self-effacing and shape-shifting forms of racism. 

It is perhaps no surprise that against this background, with the stakes as high as they are, one of the recurring questions in our seminar was that of success and what it looks like for Afrodescendant movements and collectives. On the balance, did the long history of Afro-Latin American mobilization call for optimism or pessimism? Was it a story of continuity or change? For all of our visitors, choosing where to begin and end their story made all the difference in its overall message and interpretation. For example, María Gabriela Pérez, an artist and member of the Asociación Misibamba (Argentina), explained why she and many other Afro-Argentine activists embraced the term “del tronco colonial” to describe their community. Although the term “colonial” might raise eyebrows among allies broadly committed to decolonial principles, Pérez explained, those who deployed it did so in an anti-racist sense. “La ubicación en el tiempo y el espacio es importante,” she argued, “Location in time and space is important.” Locating the origins of Afro-Argentine genealogies in the colonial period forces their co-nationals to take stock of the deep history of slavery in their country, demonstrates that Afrodescendants pre-existed the nation-state, and affirms their continuous presence from then onward, “hoy y siempre.” Obtaining official recognition of this historical narrative through a law creating a national holiday in honor of Afro-Argentines in 2013 was, in her view, a watershed moment—“se abrió un portal.” For others, like Pastor Murillo, a lawyer and member of the UN’s Permanent Forum on Afrodescendants, an overview of key developments in the history of Afrodescendant mobilizations found its center of gravity closer to the present. Murillo touched on the colonial period, with its “luchas cimarronas e independentistas,” and the 19th and 20th centuries, with their moments of “acción política afrodescendiente en movimientos y partidos tradicionales.” But he anchored his historical narrative in the last quarter century, a “momento extraordinario” marked by collective action and new legal, political and institutional mechanisms for recognition. In yet another reading of the past, Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban essayist, editor and cultural critic, emphasized stark continuity across centuries of Cuban history, activating a different (though not incompatible) inflection of the term “colonial” from Pérez and her colleagues. Present-day tourism in Havana was, he argued, “una nueva plantación,” and the 20th century was in many ways the “same story” as the colonial period, with racism and forms of racial oppression persisting under the cover of abolitionism and anti-racism. 

And here is where the field makes, perhaps, a fourth epistemic intervention. It is a field in which multiple, overlapping, sometimes contradictory temporalities co-exist. These are not just the different historical periodizations of comparable processes like independence, abolition or anti-racist legislation, which, placed side by side, can offer important insights about how and under what conditions mobilization and political change occurs. They are not only, moreover, the various timelines of narratives of individual or collective struggle, in which the start and end points, the contours of the tale, can radically shift its climax, outcome and characterization, as the foregoing examples suggest. They are also diverse temporalities in the sense of subjective experiences of time, ways of inhabiting or standing in relation to time, some of which run circles around positivist Enlightenment ideas of progressive historical time. In his visit to the Sawyer Seminar, Eduardo Possidonio, a historian and professor in the Rede Pública de Ensino in Rio de Janeiro, invoked a Yoruba aphorism: “Exu matou um pássaro ontem com uma pedra que só jogou hoje.” He used it to illustrate the unexpected ways that knowledge producers in the present can repurpose documents created in the past by repressive institutions, using those documents to shed new light on the very presents and futures their creators sought to eradicate or efface. The aphorism captures a spiraling temporality that may once have been principally the purview of certain spiritual or ethnic communities, but which may now invite new ways of thinking about historical causality and change. 

Finally—or perhaps firstly—the field contains temporalities of what we might call activism and reflection, two intertwined facets of a forward-looking collective project. Activism, as Roberto Zurbano put it, “es el ahora, es la temporalidad de ahora.” Activism emerges from reflection and narration but requires pragmatic action in the “now,” and it crafts, in turn, narratives capable of encouraging and sustaining such action. The work of reflection, for its part, takes the long view. As historian Marixa Lasso reminded our seminar, the long view reveals that Afro-Latin Americans have not (of course) always thought and acted in the same way. In other words, if there has been an infinite succession of “nows,” each with their own imagined futures, these can be fruitfully understood on their own terms, in their own contexts.

Left to rigth, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Paulina Alberto, Gessiane Nazário, Alejandro de la Fuente, Pastor Murillo.

Many of those “nows” are barely recognizable today, because those inhabiting them articulated visions and emancipatory projects that did not generate discernible futures, the sort of endpoints that we use to create genealogies and chronologies. Notable among these are political projects anchored not in blackness and difference (the idioms of our multicultural “now”), but in visions of colorblind republicanism that may seem anachronistic, even conservative, to many activists and activist scholars today. This connects to what historian James Sanders has called “possibilities… in liberalism that have been since lost.” To many Afrodescendant activists after independence, from Getsemaní to Buenos Aires, difference (especially racial difference) was a legacy of colonialism and its odious systems of privilege, of caste and birth. Those activists manufactured radical political cultures that identified citizenship with the promises of egalitarian, colorblind republicanism. That such visions collapsed under the onslaught of scientific racism and oligarchic reaction in the late 19th century does not mean that they did not exist, that they were fatally flawed, or that they do not merit scholarly attention. The activists’ visions of (gendered) cordiality, inclusion, and citizenship were drowned by social Darwinist nightmares of segregation, discrimination and exclusion. We know that, in our own “now.” But they did not. Through tireless activism and intellectual labor, those activists destroyed slavery, demanded recognition and created paths for social mobility, for themselves and their children.They tried to create futures of justice and inclusion in which the very racial epithets that had been used against them for centuries did not have a place. Just as we listen and learn from activists in this “now,” we can and must try our best to learn and listen from those in the past.

The counterpoints and confluences between these temporalities drive this field forward, conferring its energy, creativity and dynamic agendas, and reminding us that there is no single promontory from which to observe or act. From each of our different places and temporalities, to cite Glaucea Helena de Britto, “a gente precisa pensar projetos de futuro.” An effort like our seminar was, precisely, a step from within academia to help create those futures.

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