THE AMERICAS AS AN OPEN WOUND. MEMORIES IN STRUGGLE, TECHNOLOGIES OF FORGETTING AND PRACTICES OF RE-EXISTENCE
Memory, in the Americas, is not a neutral archive: it is an epistemic-political battlefield where the very conditions of collective existence are contested. From the foundational violence of the conquest to the contemporary forms of dispossession—extractivism, state racism, epistemic violence, femicide, forced disappearance—the continent has been the stage for a deliberate production of forgetting that functions as a technology of coloniality. States, colonial projects and the current dynamics of global capital have deployed sophisticated erasure mechanisms that operate simultaneously on bodies, territories and languages, shaping landscapes in which certain memories are systematically silenced while others are consolidated as the only legitimate account of the past.
We are interested in situating the analysis on the concrete actors who contest memory in the present. On one hand, state institutions, legal apparatuses, educational systems, official archives and cultural industries that reproduce narratives stabilizing forms of history functional to the coloniality of power. Added to these are extractive corporations and contemporary regimes of territorial management that, by devastating ecosystems, disrupt the material fabric in which memory is sustained as a relational practice and a way of life. On the other hand, indigenous communities, Afro-descendant peoples, collectives of relatives of the disappeared, feminist organizations and territorial movements deploy memory practices that go beyond the logic of commemoration to constitute genuine forms of political action. In these contexts, remembering is not simply recovering: it is defending territories, languages, bonds and threatened forms of existence. Memory is activated here as an organizing principle of collective life, as
This symposium addresses, though is not limited to, the following thematic axes: the ways in which indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant and other historically subalternized communities build, transmit and activate memories that not only record harm but produce possible worlds and sustain life in the face of multiple forms of colonial violence; the technologies for producing forgetting—colonial and republican archives, museums, monuments, linguistic standardization, translation as epistemic violence—and the counter-colonial archives that challenge them; forms of non-human memory and their implications for rethinking relationality and care; the links between extractive economies and the production of violence that generates new waves of disappearances, displacements and unfinished memories; gender and “race” as constitutive and inseparable axes of Latin American memories; and the ways in which social movements and new media dispute the frameworks from which what deserves to be remembered—and who has the authority to decide it—is defined.
Within this horizon, memory appears as an indispensable practice for the political struggles of the present. It is not only a matter of recovering the past, but of sustaining the possibility of non-colonial futures. Memories in struggle not only resist but reconfigure the ways of producing knowledge, questioning the hierarchies that have defined which memories count and which can be discarded.
