The inspiration for this volume came from two lines of enquiry: what role art, broadly conceived, might play in anti-racism; and whether Latin American and Caribbean racial formations can be seen as specific within a broader global context. Cultural productions and performance have long been domains in which ideas and feelings about the racial and ethnic dimensions of the social order have been expressed and dramatised, whether to reinforce or challenge the status quo. Especially since the advent of the ‘politics of recognition’, but also before that, questions of naming and representation have been central concerns in regulating and contesting hierarchies, and the arts constitute a terrain – albeit unequal – on which different ideas about the significance of names, identities and representations can jostle for space and traction. Our intent in Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean is to map some of the ways art, and the affective dimensions of human experience with which it engages, relate to racism and anti-racist struggles.