Las Almanegras: Trazando Caminos de Territorialidad en la Poética Afrofemenina Colombiana

Within the panorama of black women’s writings in Latin America and the Caribbean, the literary production associated with Colombia has blossomed and currently stands as out as an important artistic expression and literary movement. This literature has an immense aesthetic, vital, social, and political value since it is through such poetics that Afro-descendant women are increasingly prominent globally. My study focuses on the development and trajectory of this writing and seeks to contribute to this process by analyzing the writings of María Teresa Ramírez Nieva, Mary Grueso Romero, and María Elcina Valencia Cordoba, three poets from Cauca recognized as the Almanegras, worthy pillars upon which the black female literature of Colombia is being built. Located at the intersection of Race, Gender, and Writing, their poetic voices are an integral part of twenty-first century undertakings meant to revise and construct new, dynamic, inclusive, and more realistic versions of their nation’s identity. They emerge as instigators of discovery, recognition, positioning, and empowerment in today's society.

The force of the written Word has empowered them, made possible through arduous, social, educational, and political work within Afro-descendant communities that involves especially women, for the restitution of their rights and equal conditions denied them for so many years. In my dissertation, I propose that their writings constitute resistance, the recovery and defense of territories, and the recreation of geographical, physical, political, cultural, and immaterial territories. I anchor their direction and purpose within a philosophy of "Afro Colombian black feminism." Self-identifying as Afro-descendant women poets in terms of their literary, social, and political work, they have committed to life projects of working on behalf of the Pacific Coast territories, that have historically been threatened and usurped. They continue to engage the one instrument that attests to their talent and determination i.e. the art of writing poetry.

Keywords: Afro-Colombian Women’s Literature, Colombian Poetry, Black Feminism.