Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study looks at the role of Afrodescendent and African performing artists and organizers in an emerging Afro-Spanish politics. The performing arts becomes a tool for anti-racist pedagogy as artists and activists tackle institutional racism and issues of (in)visibility.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation traces the emergence of an Afro-Spanish politics and investigates the ways that sites of performance and anti-racist mobilization are intimately linked. Drawing on performance ethnography methods which involved participant observation in acting workshops, semi-structured interviews and collaboration with actors, directors and community organizers in Madrid and Barcelona, this research investigates how racial politics are both reconstituted and challenged in a range of performing arts and community action sites. Afrodescendent and African culture producers are part of an emerging Afro-consciousness movement which brings together people from multiple generations with varying migration histories, class backgrounds, and political subjectivities and claims (Partridge 2019). It draws attention to the ways in which members of la comunidad Afro (the Afro community) in Madrid and Barcelona, contend with questions of invisibility and hypervisibility, of la desmemoria historica (Aixelà-Cabré 2020, 2022). In particular, this ethnographic study looks at the role of Afrodescendent and African performing artists, culture producers, and organizers in an emerging Afro-Spanish politics in which mobilization and performance become integral to what Nitasha Sharma refers to as "racial lenses" (2019). It investigates how Afro-Spanish actors, dramaturgs and activists confront issues of historical erasure through performance and colonial memory work in an effort to places prevailing racial grammars and Spanish imaginaries under scrutiny (Shohat 2018).