In the shifting terrain of contemporary democracies, the tension between universalist norms and cultural particularities emerges as a critical fault line that reconfigures the meaning of citizenship, participation, and collective identity. This work explores the paradoxes of democratic coexistence in plural societies, where cultural difference becomes both a resource and a challenge to the institutional logics of equality and representation. Rather than assuming that democracy naturally accommodates diversity, the authors argue for a deconstructive approach that interrogates the hidden exclusions embedded in normative discourses of inclusion. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist critique, and Latin American epistemologies, the text exposes how state-centered narratives of multiculturalism often domesticate alterity, rendering subaltern voices intelligible only when they conform to hegemonic expectations. In contrast, the proposal is to rethink democratic practice as a space of agonistic encounter, where dissent, memory, and affective politics disrupt homogenizing frames and open pathways for new forms of belonging. Emphasis is placed on pedagogies of disobedience, symbolic reappropriations of public space, and micropolitical actions that articulate a radical democratization from below. The book urges an expansion of the democratic imaginary that moves beyond institutional representation to recognize the political agency of those historically marginalized—not as victims to be integrated, but as protagonists of epistemic and social transformation. In doing so, it invites a reevaluation of civic life grounded not in sameness, but in the ethical and aesthetic negotiation of difference.
Bonilla, R. (ed.) (2021) Dissonancias en las democracias. Diversidades, identidades y derechos culturales. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
