This project examines the Pan-African encounters and national cultural diplomatic actions as nodal points of the Transatlantic transfers between Latin America and Africa that were articulated between 1960 and 1990. Specifically, I investigate how, in the bipolar political frame of the Cold War, a transperipheric exchange of race-conscious discourses emerged, which positioned culture at the core of the decolonial project and solidarity alliances among Third World countries.

The research focus on specific "routes" of circulation: the artistic crossings produced by Pan-Africanist festivals and congresses in Senegal, Nigeria, Algeria and Colombia; and the diplomatic and cultural exchanges generated by the opening of Brazilian embassies in Africa. The corpus of the study is composed of a variety of materials collected and analyzed as a dispersed and erased archive of South-transatlantic intellectual and cultural history. 

The study’s contributions are twofold: on the one hand, it is proposed as a re-mapping of the places of cultural production and ideological tensions during the Cold War; and on the other hand, it aims to the epistemological decentralization of cultural studies by pursuing the formation of alternative subjectivities on the edges of global capitalism. 

This project is founded by the APART-GSK Grant of the Austrian Academy of Sciences