Haunting without Ghosts: Spectral Realism in Colombian Literature, Film, and Art by Juliana Martínez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Haunting without Ghosts: Spectral Realism in Colombian Literature, Film, and Art by Juliana Martínez Tania Lizarazo Martínez, Juliana. Haunting without Ghosts: Spectral Realism in Colombian Literature, Film, and Art. U of Texas P, 2020. 232 pp. “Colombia is a country of ghosts” is the opening sentence of Juliana Martínez’s Haunting without Ghosts. And yet, as its title suggests, ghosts are a nebulous presence in the book. Violence haunts Colombia as much as fictional and non-fictional representations of its horrors and specters do. Martínez’s book on contemporary representations of violence in Colombia joins debates in Colombian Studies [End Page 435] and other fields about the ethics of researching and representing atrocities. It specifically builds upon, and beyond, the work of Rory O’Bryen in Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of La Violencia (2008) in exploring Colombian cultural productions that engage contemporary violence. In keeping with the spectral turn in art, humanities, and social sciences, Martínez is interested in techniques of representation in cultural productions that follow “the aesthetic and ethical possibilities of the ghostly” (13–14). Martínez uses “spectral realism” as a conceptual metaphor that embraces the potentiality of the ghostly. Thus, spectral realism is simultaneously a “mode of storytelling” (3), “a process of cultural mediation and remediation” (34), and “a mode of representation” (178). As a multilayered, borderless concept, spectral realism is shaped by a theoretical framework that includes Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), among many others, in its effort to explore how haunting and specters shape space, time, and even vision in cultural productions focused on violent contexts and stories. By describing the sensorial reorganizing that these narratives create to portray historical violence, spectral realism acknowledges silences and absences as part of a collective memory through its “main components: vision, space, temporality, and an unresolved claim for justice” (40). The interdisciplinarity of Haunting without Ghosts makes it possible to think about ethical and aesthetic strategies to represent violence beyond the sphere of writing in the effort toward more nuanced understandings of Colombia’s recent history. Martínez curates a list of Colombian cultural productions from the last two decades that share a desire to challenge realist, grotesque, and surreal representations of violence. Unlike magical realism, a literary style most associated with Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), or the multiple iterations of sicaresca, a literary genre fascinated with the figure of the sicario popularized by Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios (1994), spectral realism groups together works that transcend fantastic or explicit depictions of Colombia’s continuum of violence. Cultural productions categorized under spectral realism invoke uncanny spaces, the uncertainty resulting from violent practices of disappearance and kidnappings for victims and their families, and even collective mourning. Embracing—among spectral realism’s many other sensory-driven expressions—fog, abstractions, ambiguity, disorientation, and the thickness of wind sounds as that which makes up silence makes space for open-ended, interactive, and multimodal representations. Martínez’s close reading of cultural productions that materialize spectral realism zooms into different genres and media, one chapter at a time. In Chapter 1, the author examines Evelio Rosero’s novels En el lejero (2003) and Los ejércitos (2007), focusing on the spectrality of spaces haunted by the disappeared. Chapter 2 transitions from written to audiovisual narratives to look at three films: William Vega’s La sirga (2013), Jorge Forero’s Violencia (2015), and Felipe Guerrero’s Oscuro animal (2016). Martínez highlights the ghostly aural and visual strategies that result from a careful storytelling of violence. In Chapter 3, the author analyzes artworks that materialize the hauntings [End Page 436] of disappearance, witnessing, and mourning. The close reading of Juan Manuel Echavarría’s Réquiem NN (2013), Beatriz González’s Auras anónimas (2009), and Erika Diettes’s Río abajo (2007–2008), A punta de sangre (2009), Sudarios (2011), and Relicarios (2010) support Martínez’s exploration of ethical representations of traumatic events. The politics and ethics of vision and representation embedded in...