The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture by Toby Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture by Toby Miller Ligia S. Aldana Miller, Toby. The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture. Rutgers UP, 2020. 223 pp. Through the analysis of four main themes—football, tourism, journalism, and the environment—Toby Miller and coauthors Alfredo Sabbagh Fajardo, Olga Lucía Sorzano, Anamaría Tamayo-Duque, Marta Milena Barrios, and Jesús Arroyave examine violence and its tenacious presence in Colombia's popular culture, pointing to the country's paradoxical situation: a perceived proclivity towards violence in Latin America's oldest democracy. Miller frames the text following Gabriel García Márquez's series of proposed dualisms regarding the country's reality and aligns each chapter's critical objectives with the writer's assessment of the Colombian worldview. Many scholars both in Colombia and [End Page 314] abroad have attempted and continue to hack at the mammoth task of explaining Colombia's situation, derived from the violence that has come to define the country. Miller's text succeeds in the process. The triumph of the book's critical enterprise is tied to the connections it proposes between various elements that effectively come together to prove its argument: War, and the capitalist system that generates it, rests at the core of Colombia's violent reality. In his introduction, Miller offers an encompassing summary of the role violence has played in Colombia by examining the country's history. To that effect, Miller points to the massacre of the Muisca people in the sixteenth century during Spain's invasion and colonization as the original violent event. Miller then moves to the realm of culture to show how politics are reflected in language, as illustrated in idiomatic expressions that exemplify how rampant corruption is in the country: "Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa" (When you pass a law, you create a loophole) (3), an adage that resurfaces in each chapter explicitly or implicitly. Miller argues for a multidirectional definition of violence and underlines its causes—arriving at war, and the "warfare/welfare mentality" (10)—and proposes that violence needs to be examined from a gendered perspective, given the perverseness of a "male militarism" (12) that breathes war. Chapter One (authored by Miller and Sabbagh Fajardo) is a well-researched examination of the alignment of football with militarism and drug trafficking and their place in the universe of the national popular. The effort in this chapter is to expose football, and by association the creative and recreational industries, as tools of para-states to dominate the masses and keep the State in check. The chapter delves into the period from the 1980s through the '90s, when the strengthening of guerrilla and paramilitary forces—and the consolidation of the narcotraficantes/mafia—emerged as the pillars of parapolitics, coopting football as a vehicle to display power and control on the national and international stages. George Orwell's definition of sports as "war minus the shooting" (47) helps to underline the relationship between violence and imperialism This chapter also addresses hooligan culture and hypermasculinity to show how the football match becomes a stage for displaying masculine hubris in need of affirmation. As a result, there is no place for women in football, except in domestic violence statistics, which sharply increased during the World Cup. Ultimately, the text recognizes the important role football continues to play as a central part of Colombia's popular culture while it struggles to pull away from both real and symbolic violence (67). In Chapter Two (authored by Miller, Sorzano and Tamayo-Duque), tourism is the central theme. A clear choice in the study of the monetization of the Colombian cultural and physical landscape, the possibility of tourism to create a potential space for "an organic understanding between peoples, sans state interference" (68) is denounced by the authors as a central element of the current government's proposed economía naranja and as a driver of inequality. Fittingly, the city of Cartagena, a premier destination in the country and abroad, is the chapter's site of analysis. Miller and coauthors discuss the mechanisms utilized to monetize imperial grandeur and argue that tourism is a combination of the informal economy, romanticized/sexualized national imagery...