CONFIGURANDO LA DIÁSPORA AFRICANA EN LAS AMÉRICAS DESDE EL PENSAMIENTO POLÍTICO, RADICAL Y HEREJE DE MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA (1920-2004)

This work explores the processes by which Manuel Zapata Olivella’s thinking on the African diaspora developed throughout the decades. More specifically, it is a study of his multigenre writing, and his social and cultural activism, as both profound reflections on and critiques of the processes of racialization within the Nation-State, in his native Colombia and in the Americas. Following a diachronic perspective, this study examines the debates about race and the processes of racialization in Colombia, and its relation to the Latin American and North American contexts. Within this framework, it traces and discusses some of the initial readings, travels, and writings that Zapata Olivella undertook as a young intellectual, and how these experiences informed his long and complex aesthetic and political project: including, among other things, the foundation and direction of the journal Letras Nacionales (1965); the organization and leadership of the Primer Congreso de la Cultura Negra en las Américas (1977); the writing of Chambacú, corral de negros (1967) and Changó, el gran putas (1983), and his engagement with the multiculturalist Colombian Nation-State from the early 1990’s, onwards. It is argued here that Zapata Olivella becomes over time, an intellectual whose radical and heretical political thought contributes to our understanding, from an Afro-Colombian perspective, of the complexities of being, thinking, and writing the African diaspora in the Americas