Looking at ourselves from the inside. Epistemic routes and environments of racial discrimination in Caribbean social thought

Abstract

The Caribbean World has been a multi-diasporic patrimonial space, possessing diverse cognitive influxes expressed in complex communicative processes and cultural resistance. It is this trait that defines the paradoxical character of its epistemic-identity core, determined by the hierarchies of ethnocentrism and coloniality since the end of the 15th century. Caribbean authenticity" has been mediated by attributes that specify the intercultural quality of its roots. However, ethnocentric imperial diversity - turned into the supreme value of colonial domination - still hinders the recognition of the contributions of those roots to Caribbean philosophical-social thought today. This article addresses the processes of rescuing authors and sources of Caribbean anti-racist thought, often overlooked, through a reflection that covers three variables of analysis: (I) the complex perspective of intercultural dialogue, (II) the defense of the right to life existence from difference and (III) the assumption of education as an emancipatory space that awakens nationalist, pro-independence, abolitionist and Antillean spirits. The aim is thus to make visible the gnoseological turns that express the consolidation of (trans)modernity as an epistemic revolution that, from the Caribbean, confronts the modern, capitalist and colonial model.