Afro-descendant geographies

Drawing on three Afro-descendant concepts and epistemologies, namely vivir sabroso (living richly), cimarronaje (marooning), and quilombismo (body as a quilombo, or community of fugitives from slavery in the Brazilian context), this chapter explores multiple strategies deployed by Afro-descendants’ social movements to both produce and reclaim land, space, and territory. Although at times forgotten or underestimated actors in Latin-American politics, Afro-descendants have historically built resistances against structural racism, classism, capitalism, and patriarchy from their redes (networks) and territories. Even when their struggles develop through the push and pull of resistances and co-optation, Afro-descendants undertake resistances in rural and urban areas from below through local community councils, schools, and cultural and political grassroots organisations. From above, they exercise political power through their recent and progressive incorporation in state structures and in academic places by centring and contesting white and white-mestizo erasures of their intellectual contributions. This chapter contextualises the ways in which structural racism, classism, capitalism, and patriarchy shape the lives of Afro-descendants and their social movements from colonial times to the present day that demand struggles. Revisiting the Afro-descendant concepts of vivir sabroso, marooning, and quilombismo, it delves into case studies of resistance from ethnographic research with Afro-descendant communities in Colombia and, in the case of Brazil, from specialised scholarship.