Colloquium on Latin America: Within, Beyond, In Between: Enchanted Gestures of Afro-Latin Sensibilities

Black Geo­gra­phies is a provoca­tive, imag­i­na­tive field that invites bold accounts of how Black peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties cre­ate, inhab­it, and trans­form space. Mov­ing beyond approach­es that reduce Black­ness to actors respond­ing to forces like slav­ery, colo­nial­ism, impe­r­i­al pow­er, suf­fer­ing, vio­lence, inequal­i­ty, or resis­tance, it calls for method­olo­gies atten­tive to Black Live­ness across time and the plu­ral­i­ty of places, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the African dias­po­ra. Draw­ing on Rodrigues’ vibra­tion archae­ol­o­gy (2026),Martins’ spi­ral time (2021), San­ta Cruz’s rhythm (2004), and Hawthorne’s (2019) and McKittrick’s (2025) con­sid­er­a­tions on Black Geo­gra­phies, this paper exam­ines scales of rad­i­cal imag­i­na­tion through three modes of pro­duc­ing sen­si­ble Regimes and cor­po­re­al­i­ty in Afro-Latin con­texts: with­in, by rethink­ing
plea­sure and auton­o­my in car­i­o­ca funk; beyond, through the Afro-Peru­­vian cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion advanced by the San­ta Cruz sib­lings’ research and artis­tic prac­tice; and in between, through Colom­bian bullerengue, a baile-can­­tao (sung-dance) ground­ed in col­lec­tive entan­gle­ment. Togeth­er, these cas­es reveal per­son com­­mu­ni­­ty-space bond­ing process­es formed through “enchant­ed gestures”—dance, chant, writ­ing, and instru­men­tal performance—that evoke dis­tinct yet con­ver­gent con­fig­u­ra­tions of Black­ness and Africa and inscribe them in space.