The current world order was born from the violent invasion of the Americas. Its constitution is shaped by modernity, colonization, capitalism, slavery, racialization, and gendering. The objective of this Working Group is to analyze this interrelationship and the historical specificities it has expressed in various stages. Race, despite being a fiction, a Western and Eurocentric fabrication that has permeated the sciences and the arts, has been a central element for domination and exploitation. Over time, it has become attached to bodily attributes (blood purity, skin color, phenotypic traits, body and cranial structure, genes) that still weigh heavily on forms of social, economic, cultural, and political relations. Faced with this domination and exclusion based on the powerful fiction of race, Indigenous, rural, and urban populations, Afro-descendants, and the diaspora have shown unwavering resistance and renewed forms of struggle to achieve decolonization and liberation.

The debate on modernity and its limits would be incomplete without confronting the persistent shadow of colonialism, a relationship that transforms theory into a geopolitical and subjective journey. Postmodern discussions of the late 20th century questioned grand narratives but overlooked the fact that the modern experience was always underpinned by a "hidden face": colonial domination. It took postcolonial criticism, initially spearheaded by figures like Edward Said, to reintroduce politics into cultural analysis, demonstrating that discourses about the "Other" were not mere literary constructs but tools of power that outlived the formal independence of nations.

Simultaneously, Latin American thought takes up this vein to argue that European modernity is inseparable from "coloniality," as a current matrix of power that continues to organize knowledge, social relations, and our relationship with nature. The "colonial wound" remains open, a reminder that political emancipation was insufficient to dismantle the epistemic and aesthetic structures that dictate which lives, which knowledge, and which cultural and artistic expressions are valid. Decolonial thought provided onto-epistemic and conceptual tools that constitute valuable legacies for other intellectual projects in the Global South. This extensive repertoire includes: Enrique Dussel's philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics of liberation; his proposals for a "transmodernity"; and María Lugones's (2008) conceptualization of "gender coloniality" and of the modern-colonial world-system of gender.

At the end of the 20th century, in the Southern Cone, emerging from the long night of dictatorship, Latin American and Caribbean critical thought was revitalized, opening up new questions about praxis, emancipation, and social movements. There was a return to the so-called poets of Negritude and to the mid-century Antillean anticolonial discourse. Names like Césaire, Fanon, Glissant, and Walcott became recurrent. Today, there is a frequent demand to make visible their companions in life and struggle, with equivalent contributions, as expressed in the prose of Maryse Condé.

Similarly, a fruitful dialogue begins with and among African authors, with Dussel (1998) citing Eboussi Boulaga (1977) and the novels of Kenyan writer Ngāgā wa Thiongāo, as well as his essay Decolonizing the Mind (1986), a plea for African languages ​​and cultures in the face of colonial violence. Valentin Mudimbe, with The Invention of Africa (1988), echoing Edmundo O'Gorman's book from three decades earlier, expands upon and specifies this through what he defines as the colonial library, drawing on art, literature, and religion. For his part, Cheikh Anta Diop, in Civilization and Barbarism, opened paths that are now celebrated in the philosophical work of Achille Mbembe and his conceptual contributions such as "necropolitics" or the "becoming-black of the world."

Both postcolonial and decolonial currents converge on the tragic yet powerful notion of "inadequacy." The colonized subject lives in a state of perpetual maladjustment: they are required to assimilate the values ​​of white, European civilization, but structurally prevented from fully belonging to it. Far from being a dead end, this inadequacy becomes a corporeal geopolitical space from which to rethink the world. True decolonization, then, ceases to be merely a change of government and becomes a liberation of being and knowing, a task that involves abandoning the search for recognition in the Western mirror and building a new humanity from the experience of the downtrodden.

This also manifests itself in a vast creative output that gives rise to diverse geopoetics that challenge Western narratives. Linguistic explorations and revivals, the questioning of modes of sensibility imposed by modern times, and the openness to alternative ways of seeing and speaking manifested in diverse aesthetic expressions, broaden the interpretation of times and worldviews. In this sense, new forms of orality, reading, visuality, and writing, among other expressions, draw on the messages learned from ancestors, thus valuing the knowledge of communities.

The proposal seeks to deepen these debates in an era of recalcitrant right-wing movements worldwide and the radicalization of capitalism under authoritarian neoliberalism (Brown, 2019). This phase of accumulation renews capitalist hegemony by combining extreme economic deregulation with moral and social repression. Climate change denial and attacks on the rights of Indigenous peoples, women, migrants, Afro-descendants, and the LGBTQIA+ community are part of a “cultural war” strategy that dismantles anything that limits capital accumulation (Mbembe, 2016). Right-wing movements guide capitalism by offering a path for the unlimited expansion of financial and extractive capital, hence the return to patriarchal and racist values ​​that reinstate the social order and discipline dissenting bodies, ensuring that the cost of the crisis falls on vulnerable populations (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2019).

Faced with reactionary dystopias, our Working Group opts for the gesture of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2010), which extends to aesthetic disobedience and proposals for healing the colonial wound from subversive aesthetics (Anzaldúa, 2021). Challenging the forms and practices of the privileged subjects of knowledge production and artistic works is increasingly relevant.

Decolonial aesthetics proposes a way of seeing, creating, and feeling that challenges the hegemonic frameworks inherited from the coloniality of power. It does not limit itself to questioning the representation of historically subordinated subjects and territories, but rather seeks to dismantle the regimes of perception that naturalize these hierarchies. Through artistic, community, and curatorial practices, decolonial aesthetics promotes other forms of sensibility that emerge from Indigenous, Afro-descendant, feminist, and popular knowledge, highlighting embodied memory, territoriality, and reciprocity with the non-human. Thus, it proposes a shift from the center to the margins, recognizing the epistemic and political power of these aesthetics to reconfigure the relationships between art, history, and power, and to imagine worlds where creation becomes an act of resistance and reparation. Our proposal not only proclaims itself as situated thought and praxis but also unveils a reality in which epistemic injustice is nothing more than an expression of a global injustice, of the distribution not only of the sensible but also of the material.

The prevailing cultural paradigm of colonial capitalist modernity silences even the most timid voices of those who question it. Therefore, our proposal advances the paths explored by a tradition of decolonizing and critical thought that has attempted to recover a "vision from the South" (Amin/González Casanova, 1993). In this endeavor, it has achieved refined expressions in its critique of the corporeal, geopolitical, and cultural paradigm of established modernity. Today, in a context of growing prominence for the extreme right and a deepening crisis of capitalism and liberal democracies, it aspires to deepen the emancipatory potential of Latin American and Caribbean thought. By looking to and drawing from the experiences of ordinary people who, in these circumstances, shape and reshape their lives, dreams, and utopias, it also encounters the political horizons of the aesthetics driven by artivism, social movements, and the diverse voices that sustain them and are intertwined with other memories—those of liberation.

These collections unfold like conceptual arcs, harboring possibilities for intertextualization with other voices emerging from the Global South, in a South-South dialogue that weaves new interpretive frameworks. These are the frameworks demanded by the new "contemporary scene," just as Mariátegui attempted to do a century ago in his eponymous work (1925). Mentioning Mariátegui is legitimate, as could mentioning Gramsci and his vision of domination and subalternity, or the "humanism of the Black Atlantic," which, among its various branches, includes developments in Black Marxism, the British and French Antilles, African American "double critique," and the thought and struggle of the Haitian people.

At the heart of this theoretical reconfiguration, barely outlined here, with which we find it pertinent for Latin American and Caribbean thought to engage in order to grow and unfold, lies the figure of Fanon, the articulating axis between the material experiences of colonization and the invisible wounds of subjectivity. Fanon is the starting point for two currents that, although distinct, engage in profound dialogue: postcolonial critique and the decolonial turn. From the postcolonial perspective, represented by Homi Bhabha, reading Fanon allows us to understand that the colonizer's discourse is never monolithic or perfect; it is full of fissures, ambiguities, and anxieties.

Fanon focused primarily on transforming colonial "condemnation" into a political and historical responsibility. Far from accepting the guilt that the colonial system attributed to the colonized, Fanon reinterprets this burden, turning it into an imperative for action. This stance is articulated through a phenomenology of lived experience, where the critique of modernity is not abstract, but rather stems from an "embodied language." The singularity of Fanon's intervention lies in the constitution of a new position of enunciation. He writes from the "colonial wound" and from "inadequacy," managing to constitute a sovereign and active political subject where the system only saw objects or victims.

On the other hand, with Édouard Glissant, resistance takes on other forms. He suggests abandoning the search for a "single root" in favor of embracing the "rhizome": a network of horizontal and multiple connections. For Glissant, the key is not to be transparent or fully understood by the Other (which would be to submit to the scrutinizing light of the West), but to reclaim the "right to opacity." It is no longer a matter of a fixed identity, but of a "Poetics of Relation." There is a connection between the force of Fanon's desire for liberation and Glissant's relational structure. From this arises a new possibility for the post/de/colonial subject: they do not need to ask permission or recognition to exist; their diverse identity is known to be opaque, changing, and interconnected. It is an invitation to stop looking upwards (at the colonizer) and start looking sideways, at the infinite relationships that weave reality, thus creating an ethics and politics of living and dynamic resistance.

Jean Casimir's concept of "oppressed culture," born from an analysis of the maroon experience in Haiti and the dialectic between the slave plantation and the counter-plantation, also proposes to account for those practices and epistemologies forged in a context of oppression. For Casimir, the limitations of social dialogue and the conditions of academic knowledge production, oriented toward a minority of the population, have hindered the articulation of oppressed cultures as societal projects. In an early dialogue between sociocultural analysis and dependency theory, Casimir points out that the possibilities for endogenous development lie in the capacity to establish pluralistic dialogues that connect the heterogeneity of cognitive and evaluative criteria present in Haitian society. From this group of islands, then, a type of archipelago-like thought has emerged, which in Fanon or Sylvia Winter has led to the best expressions of a Black and decolonial feminism.

Academic research in African and diaspora studies, from a Black feminist perspective, has focused on questioning how archives, as tools of power, prevent us from recognizing Black people beyond the anti-Black and heteropatriarchal colonial violence that shapes the perspective through which archives are constructed and interpreted. Black writers and thinkers have contributed to these debates through critical confrontations that seek to name the silencing produced by archives as mechanisms of power in relation to the histories of Black women. They challenge the limitations of the modern, colonial, racist, and heteropatriarchal lens that prevents us from seeing or imagining these women beyond the anti-Black violence that erases them in the archives, thus limiting their participation in history (Hartman, 2008; Philip, 2008; Fuentes, 2016; King, 2019; Méndez, 2020). Employing forms of subversion that seek to expose the fictions of the archive, imagining what might have been in order to disrupt the established narratives of events and individuals related to slavery, they reject the evidence presented in the archive to demonstrate its continuity in the present and to interrupt the violence that the archive recounts. For this reason, in this group we emphasize the theoretical and contextual importance of Black women's literature, as it is and has been a critical space of resistance.

Our proposal aims to weave together, with greater strength and refinement, this network of threads which, in its genuine protest against an "abstract humanism" that subhumanizes or ontologically denies otherness, has produced and created renewed, interwoven expressions that derive from a zest for life, from celebrations of emotion and embodiment in which aesthetics are incarnated in bodies, and in the political body. These living expressions of culture, heterogeneous and diverse as they are, traverse not only conceptual territories but also manifest themselves in overflows that de-patriarchalize, de-Westernize, and decolonize, cultivating themselves in discourses, speech acts, rituals, and spiritualities that interrelate other, non-anthropocentric and anti-speciesist expressions, which connect and branch out aesthetics, lived and experiential testimonies (which must also be recorded in other ways of working with archives) of the collective that always rises again, even from the most subjugated ground. Keeping these records, working with their plots and networks, co-participating and deploying hermeneutics to accompany such places of enunciation and creation gives the proposal of this GT a whole new relevance.