The recovery of critical forms of Caribbean thought, its themes, concepts, and perspectives, becomes an effort that allows us to make visible and recognize a body of work left on the margins of the great works of Western thought. With the aim of decolonizing the perspective, of validating the legitimacy of a body of thought that starts from other epistemic assumptions, we consider the study and dissemination of the perspectives of island thinkers to be of great value. Particularly with regard to the issue of skin color, “races”, and racism as a policy sustained by such dominant conceptions. In the studies carried out on the written, published work of island thinkers from Our America, by authors such as R. Fernández Retamar, Elsa Goveia, G. Pierre Charles, Suzy Castor, and more recent ones like Sylvia Wynter, C. Rojas Osorio, P. San Miguel, P. Guadarrama, E. Torres Cuevas, R. Lewis, Lewis R. Gordon, A. Bogues, B. Meeks, etc., there is a sustained effort, however, to make visible and to debate the assumptions on which the criticism of an essential topic such as "race" is based, in authors such as Antenor Firmin, A. Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Fernando Ortiz, coming from different “disciplinary” perspectives and from much broader viewpoints, deserve to give continuity to the theoretical work carried out by young researchers from different academic centers of the island region and throughout Latin America, in Cuban, Dominican, and Caribbean institutions, such as UNAM in Mexico, UnB in Brasilia, Chile, etc. The history of the islands, the first stage of the clash between the “conqueror” and the so-called “New World,” is marked by genocide, the lust for gold and then sugar, the fleet system, piracy; by the African slave trade, the agricultural plantation system, the encouragement of Asian and Indian migrations with precarious contracts, extortion and abandonment. The hegemonic colonial rule left a social, linguistic, and epistemic legacy, a different culture present today, which requires its own modes of study, its own analytical assumptions, and epistemic resources. It has been traditional to read the past, to tell history as an appendix, dependent on and subject to modern-enlightened theoretical perspectives that obscure the real motives, the description of a past that deserves to be retold, from itself, to build and act, to support and legitimize national and regional projects. As a result of colonial domination, the tiny physical space was unraveled, separated into distant and strange regions, its memory was sunk into the sea, and black slaves were dragged into its possessions to objectify their humanity. The imposition of colonial power caused the disruption and alienation of the new human world that was being forged. The constant interplay of geopolitics, dependency, radical revolution, the problem of the Black subject, transplanted religions, the insular condition, the ontological existence of a new concrete reality (the Creole one), and the anxieties surrounding Antillean integration or the creation of a Federation have been constants of intellectual concern and thought that proposes a situated apprehension, located within specific coordinates, that allows for the discovery of theoretical mechanisms and tools, concepts, with which to grasp this reality. Critical and emancipatory forms of thought, decolonizing in essence, break with imposed notions, with fabricated interpretations, and challenge the chains that imprison and crush freedom and human dignity under the colonial and neocolonial dungeon. In accordance with Franz Hinkelammert, they are critical insofar as they identify, scrutinize and denounce the existence of dependency and point to “human emancipation” in every sense. It is critical thinking because it is committed to liberation and change of the social reality established by hegemonic domination.[1].Of course, not all thought given in the region, institutionalized, located in the young academies, could be considered as critical, nor decolonizing. There remain expressions, whether acknowledged or not, that assume or justify the antiquated mechanisms of Western tradition and colonial domination, which is not only physical and economic, but also ideological, symbolic, "theoretical," or epistemological. The concepts and perspectives that emerge from critical reading are generally unrecognized by Western science, thought, and philosophy. The slave trade and black slavery – events that could not be more abhorred or outraged – were never the subject of attention, nor were they made visible by European thought and its insular facsimiles, occurring – as Fernando Ortiz, Eric Williams or Lloyd Best pointed out – behind the backs of the church and Western philosophy. The historical, human, and social material of the new experience was silenced and absent from the subjugating representation. In this case, the emphasis on the racial theme responds to the need to make visible how, from this reality that it faces, inheriting the colonial, hegemonic perspective, the presuppositions of an attitude, it has found perspectives that range from the description and data about the event, as well as the reflection on the theoretical schemes, the concepts that allow us to grasp these realities. This is the case with studies on mulatto identity, transculturation, mestizaje, Cuban color, Blackness, and Negrism, as seen in poetry, narrative, and the distinction of interpretive models, in critiques supported by European thought patterns. The uprisings of the Indian Hatuey and Guamá, the defense of Father Las Casas, the Haitian anti-slavery and anti-colonial revolution, Antenor Firmin's theoretical confrontation with 19th-century scientific racism, José Martí's positions and the values ​​upheld by the Cuban War of Independence, Fernando Ortiz's study on the deception of "races," and the theoretical and practical tools for negating epistemes exhausted in our spaces by Ortiz, Césaire, Fanon, James, and Williams, allow us to recognize data that have begun to be studied by researchers, young master's students, and doctoral candidates in Latin American academies. In this sense, the theoretical expressions surrounding race in the Caribbean deserve to be distinguished, recovered, and studied in their reflective implications, as part of the critical work stimulated by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences.  The main participants of the group will be doctoral students, professors, researchers and students of the virtual seminar offered in 2015 and 2016 through the CLACSO virtual platform on Caribbean critical thinking. The performance of this working group responds to the need to study its own forms of knowledge and will contribute to the visibility and study, the recovery and dissemination of the work of insular thought, referring to the central theme of Caribbean reflective work. Race, skin color. [F. Hinkelammert. “Critical thinking and critique of mythical reason”. In: Theologica Xaveriana.  Vol. 57 Well 163; pp. 399-412, 2007. Bogotá.]

The recovery and study of the work of critical thought from the islands has begun to awaken interest among scholars on the continent in recent times, motivated both by the critical questioning of the very foundations of knowledge and the dominant traditional Western episteme, and by the unjust and unequal socio-economic development that puts the peoples of the South in conditions of vulnerability, social mobility and subjection to the conditions of globalized production, linked to the technological development, communications and access to a greater flow of information. The essence of colonial domination, with a history of five centuries, becomes global, leaving subjects in the South in conditions similar to mechanisms inaugurated from 1492 onwards. Concerns about coloniality, social order, race, social, gender, and epistemic discrimination, and the questioning of the assumptions upon which knowledge, and consequently hegemonic power, has been based, have made visible the accumulated critical thought expressed among thinkers from the islands of Our America, whether of Hispanic, English, French, or Dutch origin, precisely from the beginning of the exercise of domination by the Euro-Western perspective and the opening of the labyrinth of Modernity with the conquest and colonization of the islands at the end of the 15th century. In this sense, themes with a long history, such as genocide and the concealment of indigenous roots, ecocide or devastation of the natural environment, race and in particular the problem of Black people, Indigenous people, Asians (Indians and coolies), slavery, dependence on and independence from the mechanisms of colonial hegemonic domination, the total emancipatory revolution, the experience of the agricultural plantation, the critique of the assumptions upon which narrated history and the sciences have been based to support national projects, the The problems of language, culture, and religion are once again being reflected upon in academic and social activism circles, imbued with the critique and practical action developed by Caribbean thinkers. In the construction of history and the foundation of our American knowledge, the Caribbean experience and the situated reading given by its intellectuals are valued. From the early manifestations of indigenous rebellion in Hispaniola against the conqueror, the actions of Chief Hatuey, then Guamá, followed by the speech written by Father Bartolomé de las Casas in his severe criticism of the cruelty of the conquest, island thought has challenged the conditions imposed by European imperial power. Although colonial rule is guaranteed by institutions and norms, by customs and representations, by imported concepts and philosophy, by language, religion and dominant ideas based on power, forms of thought emerged that broke the lordship of metropolitan notions, distinguishable from the 19th century onwards. Especially at the end of the 19th century and during the 20th, in the islands connected with the Hispanic, Francophone, Anglophone and Dutch cultural and linguistic tradition, thinkers of the gigantic stature of José Martí, Eugenio M. de Hostos, Ramón Emeterio Betances, Enrique J. Varona, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Juan Marinello, Zaira Rodríguez Ugido, Lydia Cabrera, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, Juan Bosch, Marcus Garvey, CLR James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussy, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Walter Rodney, René Depestre, Norman Girvan, Sylvia Wynter, Edwidge Danticat, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, just to refer—perhaps—to emblematic critical voices of the Caribbean. They have all sought, from different perspectives, ways of knowing and confronting the dominant notions in different areas, of great theoretical relevance. The study of critical expressions, and particularly those concerning the so-called issue of race, or the color line, will allow for an analysis of the wealth of ideas and concepts expressed in their historical context, and will provide a foundation for the conscious design of an immediate future that continues to challenge mechanisms of imperial power and a global economic system that jeopardizes the island ecosystem and the existence of the human species. The group's work will delve into the racial theme and the unequal confluence of Europeans, Africans, and Asians in the region, which has generated exemplary critical positions linked to core issues such as revolutions (paradigmatic for the Western world in Haiti, Cuba, and Grenada); the need to invert or question the discourse of history; models of economic and political development; environmental damage; the problem of dependency-independence-integration under conditions of socio-economic breakdown and unequal exchange for small nation-states; as well as the issues of insularity, language, and religion. Issues of epistemic debate will be addressed, concerning the concepts of Caribbean discourse and the need for rootedness or Caribbeanization of thought as a condition or prerequisite of knowledge, demanded by immediate transformations in the island space.

Undoubtedly, given the cultural, anthropological, and ethnographic realities, and the persistence of exclusionary, subordinating, and racist notions stemming from colonialism, this work will emphasize how the island's intellectuals, politicians, and artists have addressed the racial issue to distinguish that other world, that other reality or ontology, epistemology, axiology, and aesthetic—frequent in references to the region, especially in terms of race, racism, Afro-descendants, the hegemonic white European presence, migrations, diasporas, etc.—which necessitate further studies that clarify the depth of the island's intellectual and critical capacity. Césaire and Fanon referred to an other reality; Ortiz sought theoretical tools to understand another culture; Carpentier, Césaire, James, Guillén, and Roumain narrated it; Firmin, Martí, Williams, and Trouillot studied it; and all of them, through commitment and activism, have generated a wide range of perspectives. Alongside this are the peculiarities of the political, economic, social, cultural, anthropological, aesthetic, and epistemological reality, which have fostered transgression, indiscipline, and questioning on the part of thinkers in the area, as they constitute early expressions of a decolonial, critical, and emancipatory thought. Thus, the work will result in the development “against the current” of theoretical positions and ruptures around “races,” the search for other epistemic presuppositions, intellectual histories, and the history of thought and philosophy in the insular Caribbean, as premises for analyzing the present and future of the region, which, as part of Our America, is urgently needed to reveal its intellectual wealth to support future projections.