CFP América Crítica Vol. 11, n.° 1 (July 2027)

Call for Papers for the Monographic Issue of América Crítica

Vol. 11, No. 1 (July 2027)

Denied yet Defiant: Afro-descendancy, Invisibility and Cultural Production in Latin America

 (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries)

Editors:

Laura Alicino (Ca’ Foscari Università di Venezia)

Matteo Lazzari (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Fulvia Zega (Università degli Studi di Genova)

Throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Latin America has been shaped by a structural paradox: while Afro-descendant populations have played a decisive role in the formation of national societies, economies and cultures, their presence has been systematically denied, marginalised or rendered invisible within the dominant discourses of Latin American modernity. Nation-building projects grounded in ideologies of whitening (branqueamento), eugenics, harmonious mestizaje and racial democracy produced regimes of selective visibility, in which Afro-descendancy was often symbolically incorporated while being politically, socially and materially excluded. 

Over the past two decades, Afro-Latin American Studies have consolidated as a dynamic field within historical and social research, profoundly reshaping interpretations of Latin America’s post-slavery societies. In particular, works such as Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction by Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews have demonstrated that Afro-descendant histories are not marginal to national narratives but central to the formation of states, citizenship, and collective identities across the region. At the same time, a wide range of Latin American journals and research networks — including the Colombian journal Perspectivas Afro — have played a crucial role in linking archival research, cultural analysis, and contemporary debates on race, memory, and inequality. Within this scholarly landscape, Brazil occupies a key position: as home to the largest Afro-descendant population in the Americas, it has also been one of the principal laboratories of ideologies of whitening and racial democracy, as well as of state policies of racial classification and invisibilisation from the post-abolition period to the present.

This dossier seeks to explore critically the tension between presence and absence of Afro-descendant populations in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, by examining both the mechanisms of institutional and cultural invisibilisation and the practices of resistance, self-representation and symbolic reappropriation developed by Afro-descendant communities and intellectuals across Latin America and the Caribbean. In this way, the dossier aligns closely with the transdisciplinary scope of América Crítica, offering a historically grounded reflection on Afro-descendancy, invisibilisation, cultural production and the transformation of identities and spaces in Latin America. By bringing into dialogue history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies and visual studies, the dossier speaks directly to the journal’s commitment to fostering critical reflections on processes of self-determination, symbolic reappropriation and socio-cultural transformation in the Americas, while also encouraging new exchanges between Latin America and Europe within contemporary Americanist scholarship.

The dossier is conceived as a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary forum, welcoming contributions from history, literary studies, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, visual studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, on the assumption that Afro-descendancy can only be fully understood through approaches that traverse archives, texts, images, social practices and artistic production.

Particular attention will be devoted to:

• the role of intellectuals, cultural elites and state institutions in producing national narratives that incorporated Afro-descendancy as a folkloric or residual element while excluding it as a political and historical subject;
• scientific, legal and educational discourses associated with scientific racism, eugenics, whitening and migration policies;
• the dynamics of symbolic inclusion and material exclusion that have characterised post-slavery Latin American societies;
• practices of cultural resistance and counter-narratives, particularly in Afro-Latin American literary, poetic, essayistic, theatrical and visual production.

Within this framework, literature and cultural production emerge as privileged sites of visibility, in which Afro-descendant subjectivities have contested hegemonic regimes of vision, history and memory. From early abolitionist and post-abolitionist writings to contemporary interventions on structural racism, colonial violence and the African diaspora, literary expression functions as a laboratory for political and identitarian re-articulation.

 

The dossier Denied yet Defiant: Afro-descendancy, Invisibility and Cultural Production in Latin America (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries) invites submissions that examine the processes of invisibilisation, marginalisation, and resistance of Afro-descendant populations in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present. We welcome contributions addressing, among other topics:

• Afro-descendancy and the construction of national identities
• Whitening, mestizaje and eugenics in cultural and state policies
• Intellectuals, science and racialisation in Latin America
• Afro-descendancy, archives and historical silences
• Afro-Latin American literature and counter-narratives
• The memory of slavery and post-abolition societies
• Afro-Latin American religions, popular culture and symbolic resistance
• Afro-descendancy and visual culture (photography, cinema, visual arts)
• The African diaspora and transnational connections
• Black movements and the politics of visibility in the twenty-first century

 

Guidelines for Authors
Articles should be between 2,500 and 6,000 words in length, including notes and bibliography. The Editorial Committee reserves the right to accept articles that exceed this limit.

Notes should not exceed 2,000 words, including notes and bibliography.

Reviews should not exceed 1,200 words.

Submissions are accepted in Italian, Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. Contributions in Indigenous American languages are also welcome, provided they are accompanied by translations into English, Italian, or Spanish.
Each submission must include the following information in two of the accepted languages, one of which must be English:

• An abstract of 150 to 200 words;
  
  
• Five keywords;
  
  
• Institutional affiliation

All contributions must follow the bibliographic guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date).

Important Dates
15/09/2026: Deadline for submitting the title of the proposal and an abstract of 150–200 words (to be sent to the following emails: americacritica@gmail.com; fulvia.zega@unige.it; matteo.lazzari@uniroma1.it; laura.alicino@unive.it).

15/01/2027: Deadline for submitting full articles (submissions must be made through the journal’s OJS platform: https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap/about/submissions).

July 2027: Publication of the monographic issue.