Manuel Zapata Olivella, the African Muntu and the deconolization of imageries and epistemologies in Latin America

Abstract

This work has two objectives: the first one is to show the full relevance of the postcolonial/ (Afro) decolonized turn into the construction of a counter-epistemology of the colonized African cultural subject. In other words, for the colonized subject, such a counter-epistemology performs the function of decolonizing the imageries by a questioning of the coloniality of the Western epistemology and knowledge turned to a universal perspective. The second objective is that ̶ as it remains a few months to commemorate the birthday of the prolific and polygraph African- Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920-2004) ̶ this article enables to put the writer in the place he deserves to be: the place of an African subject in the Americas, whose abundant cultural and thought production was influenced by the concept of African Muntu. By employing this African framework in his cultural production, Olivella unleashes the decolonization of the imageries and epistemologies.

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Original in French.