E-grāmata: Violence and Resistance, Art and Politics in Colombia

The history of Colombia has been dominated by violence from the encounter between Spanish conquistador and original inhabitants in the early sixteenth century, the accompanying extermination and enslavement of indigenous people, the transportation of slaves from Africa, the struggle for independence, through “La Violencia” of the mid-twentieth century, and onto the ongoing civil war of today. But along with this often tragic history has developed an extraordinary cultural diversity, and a vibrant and very varied artistic expression. As we will see in this volume, these two aspects of Colombia are intricately and necessarily combined, and there has been little significant art from Colombia that has not considered the violence of its history. But more than this, the most interesting art from Colombia does not seek to simply represent political violence, as if something outside it, but rather political violence is art’s problem, something that animates and convulses it from within, just as it does for everyone who lives there. This gives an urgency to Colombian artistic engagement with its political problems, a “realism” that goes far beyond Western political art’s reliance on documentary forms. The diversity of expression in Colombian artistic engagement with political forces is one way they are exemplary, along with the intensity of their everyday conditions. It is no surprise to find the essays collected here focussing on themes of death, mourning, cruelty, violence, war, genocide, exploitation, and other extreme forms of politics, all of which are located within Colombia. In these ways, and others the essays in this volume explore, Colombian art has much to teach the rest of the world.