Africa and Abya Yala at the end of the very large XX. Great capital reification projects and resistance strategies from below

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Africa and Abya Yala were integrated into the world modern capitalist system through European colonization. In this sense, the first contacts of Portuguese around the African periplus worked as the prolegomena or the Abya Yala colonial intrusion. Both sides of the Atlantic were therefore subsumed into the dynamics of the very large XX century whose starting point (1492) would stablish the foundations of what would become the world modern capitalist system (XVI). This cartographic profile of Abya Yala and Africa subsisted although their respective colonial liberation movements. Over the 1990 decade, the liberalism, as the dominant ideology, declined and opened the way to neoliberalism.

In this context, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund reactivated their representation regimes prescribing more modernization to these areas and recolonizing them. A series of social protests appeared on both coasts of the Atlantic, raising several historiographic issues and proposals. New terms such as societies/crowds in movement (sociedades/multitudes en movimiento); anti-power movements; the ruecracie (street power); justice and dignity; land and dignity; ubuntu-pachamama and kuchamama were coined from the rear-guard of the society to raise not only the strategies of the capital to dispute what is still left in Africa and Abya Yala to be converted in merchandize but also the strategies/utensils/repertoires designed from below to challenge the hegemonic vision of the African and abyayalan territories (and seas) as a receptacle of desires and fantasies of the capitalist and modernist ethos.

Sub Track

• África and LAC, Comparative Studies

Session Organizer

• Adriana Franco, FCPyS, UNAM

Chair

• Marco Reyes, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

Individual Presentations

• Megaprojects in Mexico and Morocco: discriminatory cities and forms of accumulation by dispossesion - Indira Iasel Sánchez Bernal, Tecnológico de Monterrey

• Other ways of doing politics: Music and resistance in Burkina Faso and Chile - Adriana Franco, FCPyS, UNAM

• Territorial coloniality and deep sea colonization in Peru and South Africa versus Ubuntuism and Kuchamamism (the sea mother): societies movements from below - Marco Reyes, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa