Banquets, Politics, and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Abstract

This essay analyzes the representation in several nineteenth-century Colombian periodicals of banquets as political events and argues that journalists and others depicted occasions of public eating in order to communicate particular messages about current political, social and cultural events. Banquet organizers took advantage of the perception of meals as shared spaces of community and commonality in order to advance their own agendas, and subsequent newspaper accounts likewise spread those agendas, and those of the journalists, to a wider audience than the original group of diners.