Ana Felicien
Ana Felicien is a graduate in Environmental Studies with a Master's degree in Tropical Ecology from the Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela. She is part of the Learning and Research Community Endogenous Strategies for Good Living and Food Sovereignty at the Polytechnic Experimental University Kléber Ramírez in Venezuela. She is currently a PhD student at INEAF, the Amazonian Institute for Family Agriculture at the Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil. She is currently working at the Ecosystems and Global Change Laboratory of the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC) and is a professor at the National Indigenous Experimental University (UNEIT). She is a member of the working group at CLACSO's Political Agroecology and of several grassroots organisations in Venezuela, such as Plan Pueblo a Pueblo (a programme for planning the production, distribution and consumption of food in rural and urban communities), and of the coordinating team of the Popular Constituent Debate for the new Seeds Law in Venezuela.
In her research, Women of Cocoa: decolonising knowledge and pleasures in the Amazon and the Caribbean, she argues that the trajectories of the cocoa plant (Theobroma cacao), native to the Amazon region, have traced the contours of indigenous territories occupied by colonialism to produce and export cocoa beans. The knowledge and practices of indigenous communities and the African diaspora made such trajectories possible, in which we can recognise a division between the labour and harvesting of cocoa in the South, and the consumption and enjoyment of chocolate in the North. In this colonial landscape, the boundaries separating production from consumption are being traversed and delicately challenged by women in cacao growing regions. Both in the Brazilian Amazon and in Afro-Venezuelan communities in the Caribbean, women are promoting initiatives involving the production and consumption of chocolate. Through interviews, research into social networks and field study, these experiences reveal how knowledge that combines innovation and ancestry of Black women is reconfiguring and decolonising cacao cultivation, bringing the pleasure of chocolate consumption to the bodies and territories of the cacao farmers.
