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9 Afro-centrism as an Intercultural Force in Ecuador Michael Handelsman De nosotros, los indios y los negros que en mi criterio, nos encontramos en procesos de definición y re-afirmación de lo que hemos sido, de lo que somos y de lo que queremos ser. (As for us, the Indians and Blacks, I believe we find ourselves in processs of definition and re-affirmation of what we have been, what we are, and what we want to be.) Airuruma Kowi, Kichwa writer Preliminary Observations It would be absurd to continue to hold on to the idea of a highly centralized and privileged Lettered City as the primordial source of thought and knowledge at this stage of the history of social relations in Latin America; in fact, the various indigenous and black movements throughout Latin America, for example, render irrelevant the thought of the intellectual as absolute defender and protector of marginal social groups. It would be just as absurd, however, to think that intellectuals do not continue to play a necessary and important role in the many struggles for democratization and decolonization that have been so much a part of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Alain Touraine has pointed out in his book Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference that intellectuals “must . . . provide us with a representation of the world, of the changes occurring in it, and of the actors who can transform the spontaneous tendency to defend and assert the existence of the Subject into conscious actions and movements which can, in their turn, make political action meaningful once more.” Touraine insists, “Our most urgent need is the need for ideas, rather than political or economic programmes. Practices are always ahead of theories” (2000, 300). George Yúdice in turn, has observed (quoting Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg) that art, in general, is for raising questions: “Not to solve them but to point them out, making them present and important as the resulting 242 / Michael Handelsman end-products. Art can create space for doubts and fragilities that have more to do with real life than specific results do” (2003, 321). These same affirmations regarding the still important contributions of intellectuals and art have also been made by Edouard Glissant, who suggested that “writing is a site of struggle.”1 This struggle, it is to be understood , acquires its true meaning when writing is deployed to counteract “the rhetoric of modernity” and “logic of coloniality,” according to Walter Mignolo,2 referring to the civilizing project that was born in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which for five hundred years has subjected Latin America’s masses to untold policies and practices of exclusion and of exploitation. Mignolo’s formulation is no different from Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s observations to the effect that internal and internalized colonialism is explained more through its practices of domination than through exploitation.3 The common thread in these proposals has to do with the need to take apart the power relations that constitute coloniality and colonial difference. In declaring, “I write in the presence of all the languages of the world,”4 and in defining Caribbean creolité in terms of identities that are relational instead of issuing from a single source (that is, according to the European tradition), Glissant created an international forum wherein the diverse voices among his audience began collectively to decipher the enigma articulated by Touraine: “How can we live together with our differences?” (2000, 51). With Touraine, we might therefore reiterate that “a society that can recognize the diversity of individuals, social groups and cultures will be a strong society, provided that it can also allow them to communicate with one another by stimulating their desire to see that both they and the Other are involved in the same constructive task” (181). It might be felt that Gayatri Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism, articulated some years ago (1999), no longer serves as an effective tool in the struggle to resignify power relations, be they of race, class, or gender. The Afro-centrism, however, that has slowly emerged in Ecuador since 1990 forces us to take another look at Spivak’s formulation in the intercultural context, to show thereby that certain supposedly essentialist movements, on the basis of their own specificities, still offer democratic alternatives. This is the case of Juan Montaño Escobar, a contemporary writer from Esmeraldas, whose work as an editor for the newspaper Hoy in Quito, on...

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