Una mirada decolonial a la Hacienda de Cañasgordas: a propósito de su restauración y apertura en calidad de museo

Abstract

Since 2014, with Resolution 0423 regarding the Special Management and Protection Plan, Hacienda de Cañasgordas entered a restoration process as a museum after being declared a national heritage and cultural asset. Thus, the novel "El Alférez Real" by José Eustaquio Palacios was used to substantiate the symbolic value of the estate based on the context of representativeness of Cali society in the 18th century. However, this process remained in the 19th-century interest of reconstructing a concrete and recognizable historical past, emphasizing the preferences towards spaces, cultural environment, and lifestyle of colonial hegemonic individuals, while minimizing the fact that Cañasgordas, as a slaveholding estate, also played a fundamental role in the living conditions of the enslaved and the formation of Afro-descendant populations and/or black communities in the departments of Valle del Cauca and Cauca. Inscribed within Latin American cultural studies, specifically in the notion of decolonialism developed by the Modernity/Coloniality group, the discursive practice and thought are reviewed to identify the modes of utilization, understanding, and appropriation of the novel in order to materialize power relations from the structuring of differences and the projection of such social representations. Therefore, the objective of this article was to substantiate a decolonial perspective of Hacienda de Cañasgordas through the approach of epistemological, paradigmatic, and historiographic dimensions, to propose a way of seeing the Other that questions European colonialism and the subsequent coloniality established with the perpetuation of the Eurocentric model, insofar as the paradigmatic concept of the museum was privileged, and how this category has been affected in its construction from the fictional and factual discursive practice of the novel "El Alférez Real".