Beyond the Skin: American Black Power in the Anti-Imperialist Horizon of Southern Cone Leftists

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how various individual and collective actors associated with leftist movements in the Southern Cone approached American antiracist activism during the 1960s. In order to do so, we will consider a series of periodicals that sought to engage with the phenomenon of Black Power from different artistic, political, and intellectual perspectives. Our goal is to highlight aspects related to the construction of symbolic and material connections between political actors in different regions of the world through the dissemination of the anti-imperialist ideology that led their actions during the Cold War period. In this sense, we argue that despite the situational and programmatic differences framing their activism, individuals involved in various political-cultural projects from the Southern Cone found in the political and intellectual trajectory of American antiracism a source of "lessons" and a subject for reflections on building radical political alternatives in their own local contexts.