Listening to the Wake: Amefricanidade, Reworlding Justice and Repair, and Afro-Colombian Feminist Futures

This paper rethinks dominant politics of justice and repair in Abya Yala through the lens of gender, race, and decolonial thought. Focusing on Colombia’s post-accord landscape, it asks how transitional justice processes often celebrated for their inclusivity reproduce the liberal-colonial grammars of time, territory, and personhood that sustain everyday inequality and historical silences, while remaining shaped by the unpayable debt structuring our shared condition of modernity. From a translocal position shaped by long-term collaborative research in Colombia, the paper approaches questions of justice and repair through practices of listening and accountability to Black and Afro-Colombian feminist thought. Drawing on field encounters with La COMADRE, an Afro-Colombian displaced women’s and buscadoras collective in Bogotá that has long fought to be recognized as a subject of collective reparation, I show how their intersectional struggle redefines what such recognition can mean while challenging the temporal and territorial assumptions of transitional justice. Through theatre and community memory art, they enact repair not as restoration but as continuous re-worlding amid forced displacement and disappearance. Building on Lélia Gonzalez’s concept of Amefricanidade, which understands the Americas as a living archive shaped by intertwined Black, diasporic, and Indigenous world-making, I focus this lens on Afro-Colombian feminist practices of repair. Drawing from Black and decolonial feminisms rooted in the Carribean, I show how their struggles articulate relational, embodied, and territorial forms of justice that unsettle the temporal logic of “transition.” Their resistance to deferral exposes how colonial time continues to organize repair and recognition while marginalizing collective and territorial reparation. By linking territorialized emergency to the ongoing dispossession of racialized life, the paper frames relational repair as a pluriversal feminist praxis that refuses deferral, reimagines justice as relation, and situates healing within the living entanglements of body, land, and memory. Bringing Amefricanidade and decolonial gender thought into dialogue with the institutional politics of transitional justice, it foregrounds repair as both impossibility and ethical imperative: a poethic practice of world-making in the wake of colonial modernity’s unpayable debts.