Reimagining Territoriality : Co-creating knowledges through Afro-diasporic lenses in Brazil and Colombia

Abstract

Abstract

en In the backdrop of the historical uprooting and the forced deportation of Africans to the Americas, territoriality has become key in analysing practices of Afro-descendant resistance and (re-)existence in the Latin-American diaspora. It is in the re-making and re-imagining of (post)colonial territories that insurgent knowledges are produced, especially in contexts where the legacies of enslavement, marginalisation and invisibilisation are rife. Inspired by the ways in which young artists from Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) and Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) re-invent territoriality through artistic creativity, we developed a Participatory Action Research project that harnesses community mapping, self-writing and performance in an online and on-site exchange programme. In our panel, we launch and discuss a documentary video on this collective process realised in collaboration with the socio-cultural groups Candilé (Cartagena) and REPROTAI (Salvador). In a self-reflexive mode that casts a critical glance at our transdisciplinary co-creation of knowledges, we focus on the challenges, shortcomings as well as opportunities of doing Participatory Action Research in actual and virtual spaces for more than three years. Thereby, we bring into dialogue the perspectives of two project coordinators and two discussants who followed the process with interest, though not actively involved. We consider the participatory exploration of territories and territorialities as a pertinent heuristic prism in examining Afro-diasporic lifeworlds and the practical/symbolic attempts at memorialisation and collective becoming. Through creative media, youth and young adults re-map possibilities of existence that envision more inclusive spaces, using traces of African heritage as building blocks for individual and collective self-actualisation.