profound manner( Todorov, 1997; Gruzinski, 2007), then it is coherent and necessary to refer to Europe before and after 1492 as Pre-American Europe and post-American Europe, respectively. If we share the same world and the same sky, and the European invasion unleashed an irreversible globalizing process, the same yardstick must be used for parcelling the same story. We already know that the misnamed Discovery of America— or, as it was tentatively lightened by its fifth centenary with the euphemism Meeting of Cultures— was the chequered history of adventurers eager to trade with Asia. Their arrival was not a discovery, since America was not covered by anything; in any case, it was simply a recognition of America by them. America wasn’ t even America, because it was called so later and its name was invented to the convenience and comfort of the Europeans. It couldn’ t be otherwise than in a manner lacking consultation. Just twenty-five years after the fact so memorable for some, the initiative of a Dominican Friar, Bartolomé de las Casas, materialized into the arrival of enslaved Sub-Saharans. This genocide inaugurated the modern era by enhancing the capitalist mechanism that would later lead to the bombastic industrial revolution. They were three and a half centuries of continuous and free use of human fuel. The African American history is almost as old as the bleeding of its native people. Jorge Luis Borges ' reasoning— in his Universal History of Infamy( 1935)— is the most memorable. And Eric Hobsbawm is the only one who has manifested the European ' s unconsciousness in this fact and even recognized that the Old World owes much to America than the other way around( 2013: 277-285). In October 2007, I spoke at the First Conference on Afro-Argentineans Today: Invisibilization, Identity and Social Mobilization. It was held at the
Museum of Natural Sciences in La Plata. As I descended the grand staircases of its portico, along with colleagues and militants, I came across a man of unmistakable indigenous phenotype. I assumed it was from Patagonia. As he climbed, he was trying to put on a headband. He was going to claim the return of his ancestor’ s mummies to his community, since they were at the museum as a result of archaeological investigations or, in prosaic terms, of 19th-century desecrations and collections of war booties. Let’ s recall that the mentioned entity is the world largest ossuary. In the name of archeology, 90 % of its pieces are evidence of the( a) systematic destruction of indigenous tombs( Pepe, Añón Suárez and Harrison, 2008). We wished the claimant good luck. Maria Lamadrid was among the Afro militants in our group. The claimant looked at her and thanked for her words. " You ' re a wise person," he said, justifying his praise as he pointed to his mota( curly) hair. Obviously, they were sharing the pain of being Others, the Unremembered, the Expelled from History, those of foreign color, those who live beyond oblivion and outside the national memory. Blacks and Amerindians are creatures of the desert for the white power. It was always an unequal struggle, but time is clearing who is who, and justice emerges to reconfigure memories balanced by the facts. October 12th: Nothing to celebrate.
3. " On Olympus " and on Olympus: Afro-Argentine music continues detained-disappeared. In relation to the exhibition Music in Argentina. 200 years I left disappointed the exhibition at the National House of the Bicentennial( City of Buenos Aires, April 25th- September 24th, 2012). And disappointment is a soft term. Why? Because I was expecting a sample that
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