stolen. again. Blackening Curriculum History With Agüela Josefa in the Caribbean

• In Event: Black Lives Matter, ¡Todas! Fugitive Formations in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

stolen. again. Blackening Curriculum History with Agüela Josefa in The Caribbean
From home to school, anti-Blackness forms of training take place in the socialization of youth in the Colombian Caribbean. Beginning with a poetic dislocation of a stolen grandmother, and through a folktale made into school curriculum, the paper constructs new forms of theorizing social life that narrate into being a fugitive path in the company of Afro-Indigenous Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella’s work and the Orishas. The paper is a vulnerable stance that invites an examination into the archive of the personal, the flesh, and a departure from the ways in which ubiquitous anti-Black enactments limit the possibilities of experimenting with more layered and complex modes of worlding existences.
This paper is the result of an investigation at the beginning of the latest outbreak of the racism pandemic (Gordon, personal communication) that started in Turtle Island in June 2020. The outburst of condemnation against anti-Black racism emanating from the brutal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor travelled South to Abiayala (Latin America) where manifestations against anti-Black racism have been enacted on an ongoing basis even prior to emergence of ‘anti-Black’ as performative category (Zapata Olivella, 1983). Under white supremacist devised discourses, Latin America has attempted to locate anti-Black racism as a foreign experience negating the everyday reality of anti-Blackness from the streets to the classrooms. The geography out of which this paper emerges is the Caribbean, specifically the coast of [the colonially called] Colombia. Through historical memory and family interviews enabled by digital platforms connecting home and diaspora, this paper delves into the complexities of anti-Black family life and the survival of Black memory. The data is presented in a poem and a folktale. Conceptually the paper draws solely from Black thought particularly of Afro-Indigenous Colombian and Caribbean thinkers (Arroyo Pizarro, 2012; Smith Cordoba, 1980, Zapata Olivella, 1983, 1997). With their ancestral and elder guidance, we can denaturalize the anti-Black logic of the tale and challenge the erasure of Black being. The paper extends Zapata Olivella’s thinking on the Muntú philosophy into education as a means of fashioning rebellion and life rearticulating relationships with “animals, trees, minerals, tools, the stars, and the beyond” exceeding the race against Black lives.

References:
Arroyo Pizarro, Yolanda. 2012. Las Negras. Carolina: Boreales.
Smith Cordoba, Amir. 1980. Cultura negra y avasallamiento cultural (Primera edición). Bogotá: Centro para la Investigacion de la Cultura Negra: Fundacion Friedrich Naumann.
Zapata Olivella, Manuel. 1983. Chango, el gran putas. Medellin: Editorial La Oveja Negra.
-------------. 1997. La rebelión de los genes: El mestizaje americano en la sociedad futura. Bogotá: Altamir.

Author

• Ligia L. López López, The University of Melbourne