Alfonso Múnera (Colombia), speaks with Javier Ortiz Cassiani about Afrocolombian history, racism and the relevance of revisiting hegemonic histories, looking into his two recently published books, Fronteras imaginadas (Imagined borders) and El fracaso de la nación (The failure of the nation). Fronteras Imaginadas looks into knowledge and thought throughout seven essays, it analyses a series of ideas and reflections on how a group of intellectuals built a dominant thought system about the Colombian nation in the republic of the 19th century, with profound racist connotations, that considered black and indigenous people as inferior beings and the Caribbean and Pacific coasts as marginal territories, withdrawn from progress. El fracaso de la nación acquired its validity by being the first book to show the relevance of black people and mulattos in the founding of the Colombian nation in a systematic and convincing way, and the dramatic conflict between the regions that formed the republic. This talk will remain recorded on the Hay Festival website for later viewing.
