This project examines Pan-African encounters and cultural diplomatic actions as key nodes in the transatlantic exchanges between Latin America and Africa, articulated between 1960 and 1990. Specifically, I investigate how, within the bipolar political context of the Cold War, a transperipheral exchange of race-conscious discourses emerged, positioning culture at the core of the decolonial project and fostering solidarity alliances among Third World countries.

The research focuses on specific "routes" of circulation: the artistic exchanges generated by Pan-Africanist festivals and congresses in Senegal, Nigeria, Algeria, and Colombia, and the diplomatic and cultural exchanges initiated by the opening of Brazilian embassies in Africa. The corpus of the study consists of a variety of materials collected and analyzed as part of a dispersed and often overlooked archive of South-Transatlantic intellectual and cultural history.

The study’s contributions are twofold: first, it proposes a re-mapping of cultural production sites and ideological tensions during the Cold War; second, it aims to epistemologically decentralize cultural studies by exploring the formation of alternative subjectivities on the margins of global capitalism.

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