Our Saint John who falls from the sky

Insights for a sanjuanera policy in Venezuela

Abstract

The present text stems from the invitation suggested in the following question: what politics do the Black Feasts of Saint John in Venezuela teach us? The question calls us to explore philosophically the political powers inscribed in one of the most important feasts of that country, which, we intuit, not only constituted the force with which enslaved peoples resisted the annihilating terror of the slave whip, but have made possible the subsistence, to this day, of traces of African ancestry. This exploration recognizes, as a methodological requirement, the cultivation of a type of listening that allows the disposition of our ears for the encounter with voices that, coming from other times, cross and reach us encrypted in the excitement of the festivities of Saint John. Therefore, the text presented here has, both in its argumentative form and in its style, an experimental character.