Written by Daniela Fazio-Vargas and Simin Fadaee

Art has the power to unsettle, or at least that is what the Colombian visual artist Doris Salcedo says. With this in mind, she created “Shibboleth”, an art intervention at the Tate Museum: a crack in the museum floor. This installation invites the spectators to critically examine the history of modernity and reflect on the “cracks” created by the prevailing mindset in the Western world, among the rich and the poor, the north and the south, the centre and the periphery, the colonisers and the colonised, the self and the other. Divisions that, as the Peruvian thinker Anibal Quijano has described, are at the heart of the coloniality of power. Precisely, the idea that art has the power to disturb was the guiding thread of the workshop we organised for the course “Social Thought from the Global South”, which is a third-year sociology module, intending to apply southern perspectives to challenge the boundaries of our thinking, question the categories and concepts we often take for granted and inspire learning from the experiences of the global south. In the workshop, we sought to encourage students to critically reflect on the idea of “America” by drawing on various artistic, primarily musical, examples.

The workshop opened with the question: What is America? Responses included “Trump”, “The most powerful country”, “Cultural imperialism, neocolonialism, and militarism”, “World police”, “Unless the context indicates otherwise, I think about the US”, “White picket fence”, “Powerful”, “Divided, “Polarised”. Only one of the responses mentioned “South America, Central America and the USA” –excluding, in this case, two countries that make part of North America: Mexico and Canada. We wanted to challenge this understanding and, to do so, we referred to three songs that prompted the students explore how culture can not only shape our understanding of reality but also encourage us to contest it.

We began with Childish Gambino’s “This is America”. A song that confronts the idea of the US as a paradise of progress, by revealing the contradictions that sustain it: violence, corruption and, as the students noted, structural racism. We questioned, however, how this song speaks of “America” appropriating a word that erases the history of 34 other nations. We discussed the limits of language and how, unlike Spanish, English lacks an adjective to refer to the inhabitants of the US without borrowing a name that encompasses an entire continent. To illustrate some of these points, we analysed two songs by the Puerto Rican artist Residente/Calle 13, “This is Not America” and “Latinoamérica”. These examples laid the groundwork for discussions of the US’s political and cultural imperialism, its immigration policies, the phenomenon of McDonaldization, and capitalism. We also examined the problematic idea of speaking about the “discovery” of America, marginalising voices that, as mentioned in the songs, “have always been there”.

After the preparatory exercise, we asked the students to apply the concepts they had learnt in class to analyse Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, by looking at the visual imagery, the symbols and, of course, the sounds. The discussion led the students to explore themes such as identity, gentrification, syncretism, sexualisation, the importance of questioning stereotypes and de-centring the traditional locus of knowledge. At the end of the workshop, we asked the students what “America” meant to them. Some of their responses included: “From the top to the bottom”, “Lots of cultural diversity”, “A continent, not just the USA”, “A multiplicity of experiences shaped by colonial heritage, indigenous cultures, and traditions”. One student highlighted, again, the limits of language, noting that “Speaking casually, Latin America is erased too much”.

Most students expressed their belief that this workshop aligns well with the diversification of academic curricula. They noted that the theoretical tools they learnt in class helped them to understand current events, from the USA-Israel war on Iran, to the Super Bowl, “allow[ing] the theoretical project of decolonisation to be used practically both in the present and the future”. Some students emphasised the role of culture in challenging dominant perspectives and how the arts can be a refreshing departure “from traditional sources of knowledge”. They also expressed a desire to be more involved in similar initiatives because “It is great to be challenged on how we think about the words we use: words are weapons”. Indeed, one student pointed out that the workshop corrected a common misconception “of America as a single country, revealing it instead as a vast continent […] expand[ing] my worldview considerably”. Another student provided suggestions for future improvements, including engaging in more discussions that delve deeper into topics such as suppression and oppression, and the interplay of politics with arts and culture.