Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies by Andrea Fanta Castro, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies by Andrea Fanta Castro, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen Camilo A. Malagón Fanta Castro, Andrea, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen. Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies. U of Rochester P, 2017. 309 pp. Colombia's armed conflict, or simply el conflicto, its many intricacies, complexities, representations, and ambiguities have already been amply studied through the lens of the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, the editors of this book, Fanta Castro, Herrero-Olaizola, and Rutter-Jensen take another shot at this premise by using the meanings of the conflict further than to merely denote the cultural representations of violence: rather they approach the word conflict, and the title here, Territories of Conflict, as a way of understanding the complexities of contemporary culture without obviously forgetting that, as they state in the introduction, "conflict, in a sense, defines Colombia as a nation and continues to permeate its political discourse and cultural production (almost) to the point of no return" (1). Territories of Conflict attempts to understand how the country's multiplicities—geographical, ethnic, cultural, and political—have shaped and informed the cultural sphere in the last thirty years or so. In fact, one of the key foundational texts discussed in many of the chapters in Territories of Conflict is the Colombian Constitution of 1991 (sometimes mentioned explicitly, and other times certainly lurking in the background): a sui generis text in its own right, that legally protects the ethnic and cultural diversity of Colombia and recognizes the multicultural, multiethnic, and multi-linguistic composition of the country, working to undue the almost two-centuries-long exclusion of indigenous communities, Afro-Colombians, and other minorities, helping them obtain political, cultural, and legal visibility. In light of this new constitution, we can understand the nineteen chapters that make up Territories of Conflict as a collective work that attempts to understand the Colombian cultural sphere, Colombian identity, and the many facets of the Colombian conflict through the lens of the varied racial, gender, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities that make up the country. The four parts of this book deal with a variety of cultural phenomena, from school history textbooks to comic books, from memoirs of FARC-EP guerilla fighters to the official discourse of the Uribe presidency, from film and television representations of rural Colombia and the Narco trade to popular, regional, and national musical expressions. The first part, subtitled "Violence, Memory and Nation," discusses the intricate relationship between violence and nation in the history of Colombia and its representations, paying attention to a variety of cultural media that speak of violence in its many forms: from official state discourses to literary representations. Of note in this section is the article "National Identity in Colombian Comics: Between Violence and New Configurations" by Felipe Gómez Gutiérrez, which lays out a short history of Colombian comics, especially those that focus on representing the Colombian conflict, which is certain to pave the way in the small but increasingly growing field of Colombian Comics Studies. [End Page 621] The second part, subtitled "Space, Ethnicity, and the Environment," explores how different types of discourses—including those of race, ethnicity, development, and human rights—have affected the intersection of place and environment and have shaped different cultural practices within those spaces. The chapter in this section by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, entitled "The Greenhouse Gaze: Climate and Culture in Colombia (1808-1934)," is of particular interest, since it argues quite tellingly that the discourse around environment and climate in the early Colombian Republic created a sociocultural hierarchy that claimed that colder climates of higher altitudes were more apt for the development of a civilized society than the much warmer climates closer to sea level. In turn, this positioned Bogotá, at close to 9000 feet above sea level (2600 meters), as the obvious center for the incipient nation-state and marked many other regions of the country as disadvantageous to creating a modern society—a discourse that also extended to include the supposedly barbaric nature of the peoples found in the warmer climates of the tropic. This greenhouse gaze, as Martínez-Pinz...