This workpackage aims at analysing contemporary social and cultural dimensions of the construction of otherness in relation to the heritage of transatlantic slavery and the collective representations attached to the past and present relations with Africa.

It will emphasize their consequences on identity construction and interethnic relations. This multidisciplinary and comparative research will focus on the social experience of afrodescendant populations in European and North American (ex-) metropolitan societies and in Caribbean and Latin American ex-colonial societies. Although slavery was a common experience, the diversity of the social constructions deriving from it and of its contemporary actualization places the reflexion in a double local and global dimension.