Abstract

DE CARVALHO, José Jorge. Cultural Studies in Latin America: Interculurality, Affirmative Action, and the Meeting of Knowledges. Tabula Rasa [online]. 2010, n.12, pp.229-251. ISSN 1794-2489.

This article proposes a re-foundation of Cultural Studies in Latin America, recovering its critical and theoretical legacy, which is constitutive of this area of studies since it was founded in Birmingham in the sixties. This re-foundation of its critical stand is actualized now in the project of a Graduate Course in Cultural Studies at the University of Brasília, based on three principles: a) the struggle for cuotas for Blacks and Indians in the universities; b) the overcoming of the still predominant dualism, between Humanities and Exact Sciences; c) the Meeting of Knowledges. The Meeting of Knowledges is a theoretical-political intervention which began this present year at the University of Brasília and which allows, for the first time in the history of Brazilian universities, that masters of traditional knowledges (shamans, artisans, indigenous architects, healers and specialists in medicinal plants, masters of popular cultures, such as music, dance, theatre, among others) enter now as professors of regular courses in the state universities. Cultural Studies, taken to be the critical study of culture, can provide the theoretical, methodological and political foundation of this innovative movement, so that Latin American universities, which were created as white, elitist, racist, and mentally colonized, and entirely dedicated to reproduce the modern type of eurocentric knowledge, may finally begin to transform themselves into the kind of institution they were supposed to be since their foundation centuries ago: multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-epistemic centers of studies, open to the incorporation of all the valid, original and contemporary knowledges created and reproduced in our continent - be they Western, Indigenous, African, Afro- American , Asian or of any other ethnic, racial, or traditional group.

Keywords : interdisciplinarity; theories of Complexity; affirmative action; meeting of knowledges.

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