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Gruber, Valerie V. V. / Ndi, Gilbert Shang / Banguero Velasco, Rigoberto (2023): “Towards Transcultural Self-writing: Mapping the Struggles of Minoritised Cultures in Colombia”, in: A Relational View on Cultural Complexity: Implications for Theory and Practice, eds. Baumann-Montecinos, Julika / Grünfelder, Tobias / Wieland, Josef. Cham: Springer, 173-189.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27454-1_9

Abstract: More explicitly than in most other countries, the case of Colombia reveals that for members of minoritised groups such as Afrodescendant and indigenous communities, transculturality can be both a mobilising vision of hope and resistance, and a traumatising experience of colonisation and marginalisation. Against this backdrop, our chapter focuses on self-writing as a means of exploring the historical and ethical preconditions for a jointly envisioned transculturality, which are often overlooked in neoliberal discourses of a globalised world. Based on ethnographic experiences and self-writing research from Colombia, we examine how memory, corporality and territoriality constitute avenues of transcultural imagination. We argue that transculturality needs to be rooted in a critical consciousness of historical processes of colonisation, collective trauma and persistently unequal power relations. For peoples of formerly colonised spaces, rewriting the self is a matter of urgency and agency. It is the basis for the (re)negotiation of their existence, interaction and exchange with other cultures.

Keywords: Self-Writing; Transculturality; Afrodescendant; Indigenous; Inequality