Afro-Latin (in)visibility and the UN Decade: Cultural politics in motion in Nicaragua, Colombia and the UK

Efforts to build transnational dialogues among Afro-descendant scholars, activists and artists across Latin America are often thwarted by a chronic lack of funding, pressing national challenges to their well-being, and the range of different languages practised by these social actors (including Creole English, Garifuna, Spanish, Portuguese, Palenquero, and indigenous languages such as Miskitu). Yet, while the field of Afro-Latin Studies has historically concentrated on experiences of Afro-descendants in the discrete national contexts of Brazil, Colombia and Cuba, there is a growing engagement with connected narratives of mobilisation and discrimination across national borders. The UN International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-24) presents a germane and explicitly transnational platform through which grassroots organisations, activists, artists and scholars can visibilise their demands and contrast their approaches, contingent as they are on relational concepts of race, class and gender. The proposed Network aims to harness the international reach of the UN Decade in order to facilitate discussions among Central American, Colombian, Cuban and British peers, and open up new avenues of collaboration. At the core of the Network is a concern for the limiting ways in which monolingual scholarship 'provincialises' solidarity strategies and a commitment to interrogating the fertile terrain of Afro-descendant cultural production as a means to transcend national and linguistic borders.

Within Latin America, Afro-descendants in Colombia and Cuba (along with Brazil) occupy quite distinct symbolic and cultural spaces within their national polities. The experience and presence of Central Americans of African descent is often eclipsed in the region, however, generating a particular sense of urgency among these communities, who feel that their collective survival as a people is under threat. Despite the significance of their cultural and economic contributions to the nations of Central America since the colonial era, they are enmeshed in colonial state and international politics which continually invisibilise and marginalise their presence. Furthermore, Afro-Central Americans must confront persistent discrimination and racism. Their struggles for dignity, human rights, cultural citizenship and well-being are compromised by two realities that Afro-descendant Central Americans are forced to negotiate, which operate in different ways and to varied degrees across Latin America. The first is the effect of particularly virulent imperializing discourses of mestizaje that emphasise European and Indigenous contributions to heritage while erasing Black ones. The second is a resurgent indigeneity that has succeeded in gaining global and national forms of political redress, such as collective land titles and state support for Indigenous languages, which, in the case of Central America, are not extended to Afro-descendant populations.

Working closely with our partners at the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN), our Network seeks to organize a series of events in which this state of affairs can be directly tackled. In particular, we seek to put Afro-Central Americans into dialogue with Afro-Cubans and Afro-Colombians as well as with members and scholars of the Black Caribbean diaspora living and working in the UK, addressing how these different constituencies negotiate distinct symbolic and cultural spaces within their respective societies. Our proposed workshops and associated cultural activities aim to create productive and interactive forms of knowledge exchange between Afro-descendant scholars, artists, broadcasters and civil society activists in ways that will directly enhance the cultural and political visibility and understanding of Afro-descendant culture and political demands in Latin America and exchange strategies for action and intervention of mutual benefit to all participants.

This Network aims to contribute directly to the struggles of Afro-descendants for cultural and political rights in Central America, Colombia and Cuba. It will achieve this in three main ways. First, it will create important new spaces of dialogue and knowledge exchange by bringing together key intellectuals, activists, and artists living in, or working with, different parts of the Black diaspora. These dialogues will strengthen the diverse forms of scholarly and political mobilization for cultural citizenship and well-being that are currently underway, and generate enabling new forms of solidarity and connectivity. Second, the events supported by this grant will be widely publicized through mainstream, community and social media and on institutional websites. It is our contention that Afro-descendants' development aims are compromised by their social and political marginalization and invisibilization, which has abetted the persistence of racism among the mestizo population. The Network events seek to address this discrimination by calling the attention of government agencies and encouraging them to take the culturally-specific needs of Afro-descendant populations seriously. Third, we will raise awareness of Afro-descendant culture in the UK, in Nicaragua and Colombia among both scholars and the general public. As a result, we hope to generate new research questions and collaborations, and to enhance knowledge of, and interest in, Latin American Afro-descendant cultural production among the citizenry.

In order to achieve our objectives, the three events will combine formal keynote lectures, discussion panels, breakout sessions and public interface. With the consent of attendees, discussions will be filmed and made available as podcasts or videocasts on the Network website afterwards. There will also be ample opportunities for informal conversation and networking during lunch and planned social and cultural events. Catering and cultural performances will be provided by local Afro-descendant businesses and artists, so our activities will contribute to the local Afro-descendant economy in addition to its cultural, intellectual and political ambitions.

During the events open to the general public, we will gather feedback from participants and attendees using a variety of different methods, including feedback forms, and post-it notes for collating comments on the events. This will increase audience accessibility and yield more extensive, qualitative feedback. Feedback from the online community will be captured by monitoring online discussions/streams using social media (especially Twitter) and a comments function will be made available on the Network website.

After each event, in order to maintain momentum and overcome the slow pace of academic publication, we will post briefing papers from the event online so they can be widely shared. We will use WordPress and social media such as Facebook and Twitter to encourage online engagement from and with Afro-descendant communities. We will supplement these more interactive outputs with a published special issue in an open-access journal and circulate these among the network.