Caribbean critical thinking on race and racism
The ambiguous notion of “race” remains one of the central themes of legitimate critical concern for Latin American thinkers. The events in Bolivia, following the ouster of Evo Morales's government, have made evident the continued relevance of this issue.
This is a topic where feelings of contempt and inability to accept the racialized other are an atrocious, shameful, and unacceptable reality.
Never before has such intellectual concern been less significant in the history of this continent.
Since 1492, the inhumanity of the colonizer, the subjugation and cruelty towards the so-called indigenous and the black, have been an essential theme of the debates and expression of critical thought, that which does not reproduce or mimic the traditional gibberish legitimized by Western thought transposed to the Caribbean and all of Our America.
The recovery of critical forms of Caribbean thought, its themes, concepts, and perspectives, apprehends us this time in the work of thought on the subject of skin color, “races,” and racism as a policy sustained by dominant foreign conceptions. The work of island thinkers from Our America such as Antenor Firmin, José Martí, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Fernando Ortiz, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, Juan Bosch, Marcus Garvey, G. Pierre Charles, Édouard Glissant, Walter Rodney, René Depestre, Norman Girvan, among so many others, distinguished by R. Fernández Retamar, Elsa Goveia, Suzy Castor, Sylvia Wynter, C. Rojas Osorio, P. San Miguel, P. Guadarrama, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, R. Lewis, Lewis R. Gordon, A. Bogues, B. Meeks, Edwidge Danticat, among others, presents us with the task of rescuing, valuing, and promoting the study and appreciation of their reflections among students and researchers in the region, since these concepts and perspectives are unrecognized by Western science, thought, and philosophy.
Blackness as a perspective, studies on mulatto identity, transculturation, mestizaje, Cuban color, Antilleanism, creolité, given both in poetry, narrative, as well as in the distinction of interpretive models, in critiques supported by European schemes of thought, will be reevaluated by the participants of the GT, as part of the critical work stimulated by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences.
Coordinate
Felix A. Valdés García
Institute of Philosophy
Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment
Cuba
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