Páramo is a term imported from Spain to the northern Andes to refer to uninhabited, barren, mount... more Páramo is a term imported from Spain to the northern Andes to refer to uninhabited, barren, mountainous areas. This notion has, in more recent times, acquired new meanings. Today, the páramo is known as a high mountain tropical ecosystem of strategic importance to carbon storage, water provision, and biodiversity. In Colombia, the páramos located around Bogotá have been central in the emergence and consolidation of conceptualisations of the páramo as a strategic ecosystem. In close relation to their importance for the country's first large-scale water infrastructures to supply urbanizing populations, they are today imagined as fábricas de agua, or 'water factories'. In this article, we propose the notion of 'double support' to capture the coordinated work between water intake from the páramo and environmental conservation of the páramo as a situated articulation of the concept of 'infrastructural nature'. We trace the emergence of the páramo as infrastructural nature through two partly overlapping trajectories of what we define as 'infrastructuralisation', the first driven by the work of water engineers, the second materialising in the work of natural scientists. While these trajectories do not exhaust the complex historical process that gives rise to the 'páramo as we know it today', they do allow us to grasp contemporary understandings of the páramo as a 'marriage of convenience', whose stability should not be taken for granted.
In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version... more In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of “a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions” (1)1—Bolano’s fictional source and alter ego—he promises an expansion of the “grotesque” story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, “rather than mirroring or exploding” former versions, would be “in itself a mirror and an explosion” (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s collaborative “discovery” (also thanks to “a mirror and an encyclopaedia”) of the grotesque universe of “Tlon” (“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones 13). 2 “Tlon” offers a fantastical image of the universe as seen through the normative principles of Enlightenment rationality. It also represents the monstrous distortion of those principles under the conditions of fascism. That Bolano should evoke Borges in a postdictatorship context signals an effort to develop Borges’s reflections for an understanding of the Chilean present.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Aug 1, 2004
... References to Machado, to Borges, to García Márquez, to Dante and to Virgil serve to create a... more ... References to Machado, to Borges, to García Márquez, to Dante and to Virgil serve to create an image of devastation at the heart of Colombia's symbolic fabric. ... Rory O'Bryen is a PhD candidate at the department of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge. ...
This book provides the first in-depth examination of a representative range of contemporary Colom... more This book provides the first in-depth examination of a representative range of contemporary Colombian cultural engagements with the conflicts known simply as La Violencia that began in Colombia in the late 1940s. These include Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal's now classic revision of the 'novela de la Violencia', the autobiographical cycle of acclaimed author Fernando Vallejo, versions of the testimonio by Alfredo Molano and internationally renowned novelist Laura Restrepo, as well as cinematic works by Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina. These cultural icons, many of whom are remarkably understudied, show how the heterogeneity of social and cultural processes condensed in La Violencia demands a deconstruction of 'violence' in Colombian culture.This argument is developed in dialogue with European and Latin American cultural theory and contributes to theoretical debates surrounding issues of memory and mourning developed in other Latin American contexts. The narratives explored in this book provide alternatives to abstract historicism and show us how to imagine ways out of deeply rooted cycles of violence. Yet their insistence on haunting and spectres signals the problems besetting the task of mourning in Colombia, positing history rather than psychology as a remainder that troubles efforts to forge collective memories and enact social reconciliation. Rory O'Bryen lectures in Latin American literature and culture at the University of Cambridge.
This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of ... more This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of national literature in nineteenth-century Colombia, examining the racism at the heart of both, particularly in their representation of Afro-Colombian inhabitants of the lower Magdalena River. Then, drawing on recent accounts of plebeian politicisation, and in a reading of selected poems from Candelario Obeso's Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), it argues that beyond functioning as the medium through which criollos interpellated subalterns as alienated subjects, republican ideology also served as the grounds upon which Afro-Colombians contested exclusion and negotiated forms of political inclusion.
This article explores the significance of melancholy in two novels by Roberto Bolaño: Amuleto (19... more This article explores the significance of melancholy in two novels by Roberto Bolaño: Amuleto (1999) and Nocturno de Chile (2000). These aim to give narrative form to memories surrounding the violent dismantling of the political left that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America. Yet in their melancholic articulation, they do so in a way that both haunts narratives of political transition and questions the consensus regarding literature's obsolescence. In so doing they advocate a mode of reading that confers futurity on past remnants and ruins, and that thwarts the transformation of political defeat into a trophy of the victor's triumph.
In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version... more In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of “a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions” (1)1—Bolano’s fictional source and alter ego—he promises an expansion of the “grotesque” story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, “rather than mirroring or exploding” former versions, would be “in itself a mirror and an explosion” (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s collaborative “discovery” (also thanks to “a mirror and an encyclopaedia”) of the grotesque universe of “Tlon” (“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones 13). 2 “Tlon” offers a fantastical image of the universe as seen thro...
This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of ... more This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of national literature in nineteenth-century Colombia, examining the racism at the heart of both, particularly in their representation of Afro-Colombian inhabitants of the lower Magdalena River. Then, drawing on recent accounts of plebeian politicisation, and in a reading of selected poems from Candelario Obeso's Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), it argues that beyond functioning as the medium through which criollos interpellated subalterns as alienated subjects, republican ideology also served as the grounds upon which Afro-Colombians contested exclusion and negotiated forms of political inclusion.
‘Literature, Culture and Society of the Magdalena River’. Chapter 10 of R. L. Williams ed. A Hist... more ‘Literature, Culture and Society of the Magdalena River’. Chapter 10 of R. L. Williams ed. A History of Colombian Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2016) pp 215-237.
I begin this chapter with an anecdote told by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in their 1996 colle... more I begin this chapter with an anecdote told by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in their 1996 collection of stories, McOndo: A young Latin American writer obtains a scholarship to participate in an International Writer's Workshop at a well-known university in the United States. Upon arrival he notes that in the US 'lo latino está hot' (anything latino is considered hot stuff) and that the Spanish departments and literary supplements 'están embalados con el tema' (are feverishly climbing onto this bandwagon) (Fuguet and Gómez, 1996: 9). So great is the craze that, on hearing that three young Latin American writers have been spotted wandering around the campus only a few blocks away from his office, the editor of a prestigious journal hurriedly arranges a literary lunch-party for them with the aim of putting together a special number dedicated to the latino phenomenon. Cool, the writers think, we're going to get published in America (and in English!), and for the simple reason that we're latinos who write in Spanish and were born in Latin America. Yet the editor and the three young writers are soon disappointed. Come the end of the semester, the editor rejects two of the three submissions, complaining, to the writers' dismay and disbelief, not that they lack verisimilitude, but that they lack any trace of 'magical realism', and that they could have been written anywhere in the First World (Fuguet and Gómez, 1996: 9-10). 1 This anecdote should alert us to the currency of 'Magical Realism' both within commercial and academic circuits where the label functions simultaneously as a positive marker of essentialised difference and as the yardstick against which the novelty of more recent Latin American writing is-by way of a curiously enduring litotes-negatively defined. As Stephen Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang note, since 1925, when Franz Roh coined the term 'Magischer Realismus' to denote a post-Expressionist aesthetic, and since its political reinscription by the Boom in the 1960s, magical realism has become globalised to the point that it now represents, in Homi K. Bhabha's words, 'the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world' (quoted in Hart
As these editors note, despite recent works, the complexities of 'the popular' within Latin Ameri... more As these editors note, despite recent works, the complexities of 'the popular' within Latin Americanists' toolkit, rather than enlightening discussion on Latin American popular culture, have highlighted its exhaustion. This compilation is therefore framed by the need for new lines of enquiry to address 'the dynamic field of connections and interruptions [García Canclini's intermediation] [ … ] on which the new mappings of "popular" culture proposed in this book are operating' (p. 16). Within this context, the book makes a compelling case for rethinking popular culture from three interrelated angles: politics, media and affect. The 'Politics' section sees the 'popular' as the product of intellectual and political labour demanding a reflexive engagement with its history. Ortega addresses genealogies of the pueblo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while Page focuses on Lucrecia Martel's recent filmography's use of fabulation (Bergson, Deleuze) to reposition the artist, whose creativity comes from the fabulation in which all people engage (p. 78), addressing the quandary of the intellectual 'speaking for' the people. Hart's chapter, on the 1967 Cuban film Las Aventuras de Juan Quinquín and santería, sees one as popular culture's successful integration into a new value system (the Revolution) and the other as presenting a multi-layered picture, especially since, in the early 1990s, capitalist elements questioned that value system. Although Hart rightly attributes importance to the film's (and Cuban culture's) use of humour, the chapter might have benefited from a deeper analysis of its intricate uses in Cuba, from carnival (Bakhtin) to the (here neglected) choteo. Segre's chapter, on refuse and disjecta aesthetics, examines the work of Cuban artists from the new freedom of the 1990s' 'Special Period' to earn convertible currency to its effects on visual practice, as in the 2008 Cubanos convertibles exhibition; it is a tour de force but, for non-specialist readers, needed a brief overview of the Period (ignored throughout)
Páramo is a term imported from Spain to the northern Andes to refer to uninhabited, barren, mount... more Páramo is a term imported from Spain to the northern Andes to refer to uninhabited, barren, mountainous areas. This notion has, in more recent times, acquired new meanings. Today, the páramo is known as a high mountain tropical ecosystem of strategic importance to carbon storage, water provision, and biodiversity. In Colombia, the páramos located around Bogotá have been central in the emergence and consolidation of conceptualisations of the páramo as a strategic ecosystem. In close relation to their importance for the country's first large-scale water infrastructures to supply urbanizing populations, they are today imagined as fábricas de agua, or 'water factories'. In this article, we propose the notion of 'double support' to capture the coordinated work between water intake from the páramo and environmental conservation of the páramo as a situated articulation of the concept of 'infrastructural nature'. We trace the emergence of the páramo as infrastructural nature through two partly overlapping trajectories of what we define as 'infrastructuralisation', the first driven by the work of water engineers, the second materialising in the work of natural scientists. While these trajectories do not exhaust the complex historical process that gives rise to the 'páramo as we know it today', they do allow us to grasp contemporary understandings of the páramo as a 'marriage of convenience', whose stability should not be taken for granted.
In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version... more In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of “a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions” (1)1—Bolano’s fictional source and alter ego—he promises an expansion of the “grotesque” story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, “rather than mirroring or exploding” former versions, would be “in itself a mirror and an explosion” (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s collaborative “discovery” (also thanks to “a mirror and an encyclopaedia”) of the grotesque universe of “Tlon” (“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones 13). 2 “Tlon” offers a fantastical image of the universe as seen through the normative principles of Enlightenment rationality. It also represents the monstrous distortion of those principles under the conditions of fascism. That Bolano should evoke Borges in a postdictatorship context signals an effort to develop Borges’s reflections for an understanding of the Chilean present.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Aug 1, 2004
... References to Machado, to Borges, to García Márquez, to Dante and to Virgil serve to create a... more ... References to Machado, to Borges, to García Márquez, to Dante and to Virgil serve to create an image of devastation at the heart of Colombia's symbolic fabric. ... Rory O'Bryen is a PhD candidate at the department of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge. ...
This book provides the first in-depth examination of a representative range of contemporary Colom... more This book provides the first in-depth examination of a representative range of contemporary Colombian cultural engagements with the conflicts known simply as La Violencia that began in Colombia in the late 1940s. These include Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal's now classic revision of the 'novela de la Violencia', the autobiographical cycle of acclaimed author Fernando Vallejo, versions of the testimonio by Alfredo Molano and internationally renowned novelist Laura Restrepo, as well as cinematic works by Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina. These cultural icons, many of whom are remarkably understudied, show how the heterogeneity of social and cultural processes condensed in La Violencia demands a deconstruction of 'violence' in Colombian culture.This argument is developed in dialogue with European and Latin American cultural theory and contributes to theoretical debates surrounding issues of memory and mourning developed in other Latin American contexts. The narratives explored in this book provide alternatives to abstract historicism and show us how to imagine ways out of deeply rooted cycles of violence. Yet their insistence on haunting and spectres signals the problems besetting the task of mourning in Colombia, positing history rather than psychology as a remainder that troubles efforts to forge collective memories and enact social reconciliation. Rory O'Bryen lectures in Latin American literature and culture at the University of Cambridge.
This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of ... more This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of national literature in nineteenth-century Colombia, examining the racism at the heart of both, particularly in their representation of Afro-Colombian inhabitants of the lower Magdalena River. Then, drawing on recent accounts of plebeian politicisation, and in a reading of selected poems from Candelario Obeso's Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), it argues that beyond functioning as the medium through which criollos interpellated subalterns as alienated subjects, republican ideology also served as the grounds upon which Afro-Colombians contested exclusion and negotiated forms of political inclusion.
This article explores the significance of melancholy in two novels by Roberto Bolaño: Amuleto (19... more This article explores the significance of melancholy in two novels by Roberto Bolaño: Amuleto (1999) and Nocturno de Chile (2000). These aim to give narrative form to memories surrounding the violent dismantling of the political left that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America. Yet in their melancholic articulation, they do so in a way that both haunts narratives of political transition and questions the consensus regarding literature's obsolescence. In so doing they advocate a mode of reading that confers futurity on past remnants and ruins, and that thwarts the transformation of political defeat into a trophy of the victor's triumph.
In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version... more In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolano frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of “a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions” (1)1—Bolano’s fictional source and alter ego—he promises an expansion of the “grotesque” story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, “rather than mirroring or exploding” former versions, would be “in itself a mirror and an explosion” (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s collaborative “discovery” (also thanks to “a mirror and an encyclopaedia”) of the grotesque universe of “Tlon” (“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones 13). 2 “Tlon” offers a fantastical image of the universe as seen thro...
This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of ... more This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of national literature in nineteenth-century Colombia, examining the racism at the heart of both, particularly in their representation of Afro-Colombian inhabitants of the lower Magdalena River. Then, drawing on recent accounts of plebeian politicisation, and in a reading of selected poems from Candelario Obeso's Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), it argues that beyond functioning as the medium through which criollos interpellated subalterns as alienated subjects, republican ideology also served as the grounds upon which Afro-Colombians contested exclusion and negotiated forms of political inclusion.
‘Literature, Culture and Society of the Magdalena River’. Chapter 10 of R. L. Williams ed. A Hist... more ‘Literature, Culture and Society of the Magdalena River’. Chapter 10 of R. L. Williams ed. A History of Colombian Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2016) pp 215-237.
I begin this chapter with an anecdote told by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in their 1996 colle... more I begin this chapter with an anecdote told by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in their 1996 collection of stories, McOndo: A young Latin American writer obtains a scholarship to participate in an International Writer's Workshop at a well-known university in the United States. Upon arrival he notes that in the US 'lo latino está hot' (anything latino is considered hot stuff) and that the Spanish departments and literary supplements 'están embalados con el tema' (are feverishly climbing onto this bandwagon) (Fuguet and Gómez, 1996: 9). So great is the craze that, on hearing that three young Latin American writers have been spotted wandering around the campus only a few blocks away from his office, the editor of a prestigious journal hurriedly arranges a literary lunch-party for them with the aim of putting together a special number dedicated to the latino phenomenon. Cool, the writers think, we're going to get published in America (and in English!), and for the simple reason that we're latinos who write in Spanish and were born in Latin America. Yet the editor and the three young writers are soon disappointed. Come the end of the semester, the editor rejects two of the three submissions, complaining, to the writers' dismay and disbelief, not that they lack verisimilitude, but that they lack any trace of 'magical realism', and that they could have been written anywhere in the First World (Fuguet and Gómez, 1996: 9-10). 1 This anecdote should alert us to the currency of 'Magical Realism' both within commercial and academic circuits where the label functions simultaneously as a positive marker of essentialised difference and as the yardstick against which the novelty of more recent Latin American writing is-by way of a curiously enduring litotes-negatively defined. As Stephen Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang note, since 1925, when Franz Roh coined the term 'Magischer Realismus' to denote a post-Expressionist aesthetic, and since its political reinscription by the Boom in the 1960s, magical realism has become globalised to the point that it now represents, in Homi K. Bhabha's words, 'the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world' (quoted in Hart
As these editors note, despite recent works, the complexities of 'the popular' within Latin Ameri... more As these editors note, despite recent works, the complexities of 'the popular' within Latin Americanists' toolkit, rather than enlightening discussion on Latin American popular culture, have highlighted its exhaustion. This compilation is therefore framed by the need for new lines of enquiry to address 'the dynamic field of connections and interruptions [García Canclini's intermediation] [ … ] on which the new mappings of "popular" culture proposed in this book are operating' (p. 16). Within this context, the book makes a compelling case for rethinking popular culture from three interrelated angles: politics, media and affect. The 'Politics' section sees the 'popular' as the product of intellectual and political labour demanding a reflexive engagement with its history. Ortega addresses genealogies of the pueblo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while Page focuses on Lucrecia Martel's recent filmography's use of fabulation (Bergson, Deleuze) to reposition the artist, whose creativity comes from the fabulation in which all people engage (p. 78), addressing the quandary of the intellectual 'speaking for' the people. Hart's chapter, on the 1967 Cuban film Las Aventuras de Juan Quinquín and santería, sees one as popular culture's successful integration into a new value system (the Revolution) and the other as presenting a multi-layered picture, especially since, in the early 1990s, capitalist elements questioned that value system. Although Hart rightly attributes importance to the film's (and Cuban culture's) use of humour, the chapter might have benefited from a deeper analysis of its intricate uses in Cuba, from carnival (Bakhtin) to the (here neglected) choteo. Segre's chapter, on refuse and disjecta aesthetics, examines the work of Cuban artists from the new freedom of the 1990s' 'Special Period' to earn convertible currency to its effects on visual practice, as in the 2008 Cubanos convertibles exhibition; it is a tour de force but, for non-specialist readers, needed a brief overview of the Period (ignored throughout)
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