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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies ed. by Andrea Fanta, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen Juliana Martínez Fanta, Andrea, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen, editors. Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies. Rochester, New York: U of Rochester P, 2017. 309 pp. ISBN: 978-15-8046-580-9. In Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies editors Fanta, Herrero-Olaizola and Rutter-Jensen bring together a wide array of interdisciplinary works that unpack what the editors call "the territoriality of dissension" in Colombia, a productive term to name the contested discourses that dominate the body politic in a given geographical and political space (1). Conceived "at its core as a cultural studies reader" (6), the volume maps how the various meanings of conflict play out in Colombia's physical and symbolic terrains, paying special attention to how the—ever-elusive, yet seemingly omnipresent—category of colombianidad is itself a contested and conflictive space. One of the main strengths of the volume is its multifocal and multilayered approach. When combined, the great variety of fields represented by its contributions (history, sociology, cultural studies, humanities, political science, and musicology among others) provide a comprehensive and thorough understanding of the cultural, economic, political and military conflicts —necessarily fueled by uneven ethno-racial and gender dynamics and the heteronormative imperative—that underlie the Colombian nation. But conflict can also be a source of creativity, begetting a profitable cultural industry that, despite often bordering on the mere commodification of historically marginalized identities and cultural practices, also manages to carve out spaces for resistance, critical engagement with hegemonic narratives of nation (re)building and branding, and ethical discernment. The collection consists of nineteen chapters divided in four thematic clusters. Part 1, "Violence, Memory and Nation," examines how conflict is represented —or repressed—in different types of narratives about the historical past. From analyses of school textbooks for children (Louis) and memoirs of guerrilla commanders (Jiménez); to a keen look at memorializing efforts of El Bogotazo (Schuster), the "politics of brutality" (89) of Álvaro Uribe's government (Lobo), and alternative forms of representation like comics and graphic novels (Gómez Gutiérrez), the [End Page 161] essays in this section show that conflict is not only the content of many of these historical narratives, but also, and most notably, that historical representation and memorializing efforts are territories of conflict where the symbolic meaning of the nation is constantly being renegotiated. Part 2, "Space, Ethnicity, and the Environment," focuses on what the editors call "the racialization of modernity" (10) in Colombia. That is to say, how "geographical mapping invokes hierarchical belonging" (9). Martínez-Pinzón looks at nineteenth century implicit and explicit racist discourses deployed through climate and geography-based imagery when arguing for the need for the nation's progress; Alí's contribution highlights the contemporary consequences of looking at people through the lens of racialized territorialities in his study of the Makilakuntiwala Kuna indigenous community; Herrera Arango analyzes the strategic deployment of human rights discourse on the part of the Witotos in Leticia, the capital of Colombia's Amazon region; and the section's closing essay, Margarita Cuellar's and Joaquín Llorca's "The Soundscape and the Reshaping of Territories: Neighborhood Sounds in San Nicolás, Cali," explores the intersection between the audible environment of a space and notions of identity and belonging. Part 3, "Body and Gender Politics," unpacks the multiple ways in which the body itself becomes a site of conflict through the exploration of the in/visibility of amputated bodies injured by landmines, both in the cultural realm and the social imagination (Diana Pardo); a careful look at the role of women's activism during the peace process and its impact in the long-term reimagining of the nation (Kate Paarleberg-Kvam); an in-depth analysis of the racial and patriarchal ideals mobilized by Juan Valdez, the iconic —white-mestizo—coffee farmer, and the National Coffee Queens displayed in El Parque Nacional del Café as part of the commodification of natural resources and of colombianidad itself (Stacey Hunt); and the comparative analysis of two versions of the same music...