INTERCULTURALISM AND RACISM IN THE CENTRE-PERIPHERY CIRCUIT: CRITICAL CONTRIBUTION FROM NEGRITUDE POINT OF VIEW

Abstract

: In this article the author aims at reflecting on racism, articulating the concepts of interculturalism and multiculturalism in a double perspective, on the one hand the hegemonic and official views and on the other hand the socio-political constructions that can be derived from the analysis of the indigenous and Afro-diasporic movements. It is postulated that these ways of thinking and understanding diversity work in the Centre-Periphery relationship, hence conceptual misunderstandings. While in the global north interculturalism is not distinguished from inclusion measures within the framework of state multiculturalism, in the global south, especially in Latin America, interculturalism works in an anti-hegemonic political logic as an initiative of ethnic-racial movements. Interculturalism is considered a project still to be built in an inter-subjective dynamic of people and cultural nations of the Americas and other places in the world.  However, from the historical reactions of Negritude to the project of capitalist modernity, intellectual antiracism ideas and movements are found long before the emergence of the intercultural indigenous discourse. Epistemic manifestations of Negritude are assumed by the academy as political essentialism in the pejorative sense of the term. It is because of the emergence of new ideas that constitute Afro-descendant thought in the long game of historical development that opens up new fields of confrontation. In any case, this article proposes the Afro-diasporic political construction from the category outside the house of the master who as a critical mindset is capable of facing political and epistemological debates with dominant spheres of society.