Exiled memories and an other knowledge. Afro-descendant re-existences in Medellín (Colombia)

Abstract

Exile in Colombia has constituted a socio-spatial dispositive of domination and control, which, in the last decade has plundered around four million people, most of them Afro-descendants and natives. For the Afrodescendant peoples, exile is associated with the kidnapping of slaves, the racial discrimination and the violence which has subalterned and geo-situated them as losers and defeated in the contemporary war. The Afrodescendants, wandering and rootless, bear exiled memories which incarnate invisibilized knowledges in the national identity and are relegated from the geopolitics of knowledge production and circulation. In this work we will explore how the experience of Afro-descendant exile in Medellín produces the re-existence of political subjects who endeavour to survive physically and to manage spaces of social inclusion. To re exist from the Afro-Colombian condition implies: to articulate different knowledges and practices in order to encourage solidarity; to display creative ways of being/thinking; and, to produce spatialities in the middle of the urban precariousness.