Carlos Manrique

Professor, Dept. Philosophy, Universidad de los Andes

“Ontologies of the Colonized Body, and the Politics of Religious Edgings (notes on a civic popular uprising in Afro-Colombia’s pacific littoral) 

Monday, May 13th, 12:00 PM, Swift 106

The paper is part of a work in progress engaged in a philosophical narration of a forceful
civic uprising that took place in the main city port of Colombia’s pacific littoral,
Buenaventura, in 2017. Such a narration seeks to elaborate the ways in which the archive,
and the testimonies of participants, from this political event call for a conceptual re-
description or re-imagining of, among other issues: the theologico-political; the
topographies of the social space in which it took place; what a peace-building religious
activism implies here in a hardly recognizable form; the ontology of the political that can
account for the force of ethnic, racial and religious difference that this event mobilized.
This presentation is focused on this last question. It puts into conversation the historical
singularity and density of this event, with an aporia that, in our view, contemporary
political theory confronts: the short circuit between sites of political praxis in which the
political import and force of cultural difference is unmistakable, and the way in which the
prevalent frameworks in political theory to render it legible miss it (be it liberal
multiculturalism, or the contemporary critiques of it that reclaim the return of a universal
subject). The exposition also enters in dialogue with other interventions in critical theory
that have proposed an ontological level of analysis into the problem of the politics of ethnic
or racial difference, such as Franz Fanon’s ontology of the colonized body.

Lunch will be provided

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinator William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.