Ethical and Political Implications of “Performance” in a Rural Cultural Practice: Afro-Colombian Women Singers from the Town of Pogue

Abstract

This article analyzes a group of Afro-Colombian female singers from Pogue, a rural area of the Colombian Pacific who have reinvented traditional mourning songs (alabaos). Their music and performance refer to the massacres and abuses committed by both the FARC leftist guerrilla group and the rightwing paramilitary in the nearby village of Bojayá. We will not study these traditional mourning songs from an ethnographic perspective, but from the interdisciplinary perspective of performance studies. As such, the aim here is to emphasize the wider political and artistic dimension of the songs vis-à-vis Colombian necropolitics. However, we will still rely on the work of social scientists as we recognize the importance of grounding our analysis on a specific reality. In addition, we find a foothold on Rustom Bharucha’s perspective on the performativity of “terror’ in the Global South, as we think this Indian cultural critic is spot-on when questioning the “war on terror” master narrative resulting from the attacks on September 11, 2001, and looking instead at other areas of the world where “terror” assumes a concrete and visceral dimension in everyday life.