CONVERGING TO DECOLONIZE

AFRODIASPORIC AND AMERINDIAN CONTRIBUTIONS FOR A CRITICAL APPROACH TO LAW

Abstract

This paper conducts a literature review and critical analysis of the theories and practices of decolonization from the perspective of African diaspora, indigenous insurgency, and critique of law, in relation to the epistemic centralities that have crossed time and space to destroy and demobilize irruption in whatever places it may present itself. The hypothesis is that there is a flaw in the way that theoretical frameworks about colonization are still understood in modernity. In this sense, the goal is to break with Eurocentric notions that the colonization journey represented a mere discovery of the lands of the Global South, but rather, an invasion that is not only understood geographically, but also epistemically. Thus, Afro-Diasporic and Amerindian contributions represent significant insurgencies that question the violent and oppressive colonial mechanisms of racial hierarchization, while at the same time criticizing the legacies that structure ethno-racial discrimination issues in modernity based on them. To this end, with regard to those first contributions, it is mentioned that central elements such as Afrocentrality and Ubuntu make up a powerful theoretical-philosophical, practical, and onto-epistemological framework that allows for positive changes in the socio-environmental reality of vulnerable beings. And in this sense, in relation to the contributions of the original peoples of America, we have the good life as a biocentric and material expressiveness that demands a communal and dialogical action with nature. The way racism and Eurocentric thinking suppressed African and Amerindian culture and subjectivities caused many of these thoughts and cosmovisions to be decimated until modernity. In this sense, it is argued that law, in turn, should act in this context in order to produce justice, in radical and material terms, and the recognition of groups historically subalternized by the logics of colonialism and coloniality, decolonizing institutional structures and promoting, in short, a subversion of epistemologies from the South.