Many of Africa’s current challenges derive in large part from the system of power institutionalized by colonialism, establishing, from the epistemological hierarchy, relations of inequality where the criteria of gender, race and class, health, disease and others were superimposed on local categories. With this rewriting, local ontologies occupied peripheral spaces of knowledge in a web of historically established power relations. Categories used to classify the population in the process of shaping its representation and self-representation.
There are several proposals for an articulation of the multiplicity that take place today from an active participation of the communities, transforming institutions, entities and areas of knowledge into spaces for debate, research and praxis from which to dialogue about and from the decolonial process. Allowing a glimpse of the way in which history has been written, revisiting its discourses, and incorporating the narratives of colonized peoples. Proposals conceived from mutual learning and methodologies that start from the target population, building and transforming society from co-development, facilitating coexistence and mutual enrichment. Today, sustainability cannot be understood without a decolonial approach, since the United Nations 2030 Agenda is based on improving people’s well-being and their access to a dignified life in conditions of equality, and climate challenges require responses that take biocoloniality into account.
In this sense, we understand that it is necessary to understand and analyze these processes from an epistemic equality. This implies questioning and analyzing the spaces occupied by many local knowledges and leads us to investigate the causes and consequences of this hierarchization, as well as the agentiality of many categories that today remain in spaces of subalternity. Spheres that take shape in the material and immaterial heritages born of migrations, not only of people, but also of traditions and practices that have crossed the Atlantic in one direction and another, time and time again.
The panel, therefore, aims to address the conceptual and cultural richness of these peoples and their diaspora, and how these translate into a cultural diversity that can only be analyzed if we take into account the point of view of its protagonists and approach them from non-Eurocentric reflections, methodologies and categories.
There are many investigations based on methodological assumptions that attempt to give protagonism to those who make the research possible (Restrepo and Escobar, 2005) and through interaction in terms of those who are part of this community (Rosaldo, 1991). Studies that do not consider the collectives with which research is conducted as objects of study, but as political and epistemic agents, addressing the possibility of the decolonial perspective as a useful tool for confronting hegemonic representational models from a gender perspective (Palermo, 2006). Debates that open up to assess the capacity of the decolonial perspective to have an impact on the social realities with and on which it worked. Likewise, other research analyzes the role of diaspora, territory and race and the intersectionality between the different categories (Fernández, et al, 2021). The proposal assumes the importance of reconstructing the theory from the field, in constant dialogue and without fear that reality does not fit with the theory that tried to define it. Redrawing the concepts and categories of research from the ethnographic experience, starting from the recognition of other ontologies that can be lived and recognized in the participatory experience, and as Manuela Cantón collects “knowing/experiencing agency” (2017: 336).
Therefore, this panel aims to welcome papers in the fields of history, social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology and art that aim to reflect on the implementation of the decolonial approach from, in and about Africa in its Atlantic dimension during the 17th to the 21st centuries, while promoting cultural diversity with a gender approach. Seeking approaches to the various forms in which they manifest themselves today, trying to articulate this perspective with ecology, violence, interspecies debates, religiosity, spirituality, identity and the geopolitics of hegemonic knowledge.
