This book explores how art, broadly defined, shapes the politics of anti-racism—and thus the politics of racism—in Latin America and the Caribbean in the twenty-first century. Editors Peter Wade, James Scorer, and Ignacio Aguiló have compiled a rich interdisciplinary collection that places turn-of-the-century multicultural legislation in conversation with racialized cultural expressions in film, photography, art, music, and education. The chapters collectively consider how a racially and ethnically diverse set of actors—from teachers in Rio de Janeiro and white fusion musicians in Lima to documentary filmmakers in Argentina and Peru, Caribbean conceptual artists, and indigenous and African-descended musicians in Bolivia—navigated neoliberalism and multiculturalism.

The strengths of the book come from its reformulation of how we consider the region's long-standing claims of racial harmony. As Nick Morgan cautions in his chapter on neoliberalism, political participation, and wealth distribution in Colombia, this subject matter is not an inquiry into an “official culture of anti-racism, a term that seems decidedly out of place in a country where racism continues to be such an obvious everyday reality” (25). Each contributor explores how anti-racism has been activated in societies that maintain racial inequalities and that have historically been defined by narratives of racelessness, racial mixture, and assimilation. As such, Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean rethinks the region's racial formations by demonstrating the coexistence of racism and anti-racism in mestizaje, what Wade, Scorer, and Aguiló call its “dual character” (4). The collection ponders whether multicultural initiatives have hardened racial boundaries, thereby hindering the very anti-racist goals they espouse. As Lena Schubmann explains in her fascinating analysis of Saya music and the Bonifaz monarchy in Bolivia, racial mobilization required clear cultural demarcations that reinforced anti-Black stereotypes and that also provided new avenues for social justice and political reform.

Although this compilation pays homage to a longer history of race and racism in Latin America and the Caribbean, readers should not expect a history of blackness, indigeneity, or mestizaje. For example, the history of enslaving Africans frames Fabienne Viala's analysis of how Caribbean conceptual artists challenged their audiences to transgress racial boundaries while they considered the cultural politics of reparations. Similarly, Charlotte Gleghorn reads contemporary films as palimpsests that quote, reproduce, and comment on colonialist films from the first half of the twentieth century. Indigenous filmmakers, she argues, drew on a longer history of racialized visual cultures, like casta paintings and photography, to articulate their own “audiovisual sovereignty” (75). In broader terms, the collection's chapters encourage a greater investigation into the role of new technologies—such as the smartphone app No Racismo that the Bolivian state created in 2016—in crafting multicultural societies. Similarly, chapters by Patricia Oliart and Agustina Triquell and by Henry Stobart explore how the Internet provided digital photographers and musicians respectively with the means to produce and disseminate antiracist politics.

However, the lack of a stronger historical framework leaves the question of whether the relationship between art and anti-racism is new. At best, Wade, Scorer, and Aguiló note that postrevolutionary Mexican muralism and négritude in the Francophone Caribbean provide some historical context, since they “demonstrate the rich tradition of anti-racist art in 20th-century Latin America and the Caribbean” (13). Their introduction outlines the scope of the book, but it could better unify the collection's subthemes. This work's empirical richness is a welcome addition to the field, but it requires the reader to possess a broad knowledge of Latin American and Caribbean racial formations to wade through the volume's theoretical and disciplinary diversity. Consequently, it is probably better suited for graduate students than undergraduates.