Karibe Alter-Nativo

Towards an epistemology of sensitive maroonage

Abstract

This article was written after participating in a research-creation project directed by Universidad del Magdalena, in Santa Marta, Colombia. Karibe Alter-Nativo occurred in the first Encuentro de Creación y Pensamiento del Caribe Colombiano (Creation and Thinking in the Colombian Caribbean Symposium) in March 2025. I proposed to re-write Karibbean, with a K, as a decolonial gesture that defies the “Westoxification” of the language. At the beginning of the article, the methodology of the workshop is presented, as well as the emphasis of using creative writing as a tool of epistemic resistance and recognition of hidden realities. Within the workshop there was a space for questioning stereotypes associated with corporalities from northern Colombia; how Europe and the United States embedded a extractivist, hypersexualized and long-vacation vision in these territories. The following section incorporates personal reflections towards nostalgia and migration, especially as people who were born in the Karibbean but had to flee in a different zone. The Karibbean gets inscribed in corporalities beyond geographies. Radical imagination becomes a counter-discourse towards hegemonic representations, and it simultaneously validates diverse, creative knowledge. Karibbean corporalities are a living archive where new possibilities of (re) existing sprout.

Keywords: epistemic maroonage; creative writing; migration; radical imagination; Afro-Caribbean identity; narrative decolonization.