| Contemporary Colombian fiction of the late 20th and early 21st century is populated with images of destruction and its remnants and with confused subjects who face the difficult task of articulating memory. The images of psychic and material catastrophe that abound in novels and films or this period evoke the destructive power of the many forms of violence experienced in a country marked by complex social conflicts, confrontations between armed groups and the State, a globalized drug trade and the wars deployed around it, and diverse forms of social unrest. Considering the rich tradition of reflection about history, memory and violence that has emerged in this period in Colombia, this dissertation focuses on a number of fictional and testimonial narratives of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21 st century that articulate violent historical events in order to insist on the possibilities of articulating memory and of reconstructing the social fabric in times of crisis. This dissertation shows how specific texts (Fernando Vallejo's La Virgen de los sicarios, Laura Restrepo's Delirio, Ciro Guerra's film La sombra del caminante, and the epistolary testimonies that comprise the "Cartas de la persistencia" archive) intervene in a debate often monopolized by "violentologos", the social scientists who have systematically focused on armed violence as a phenomenon to be dissected for policy implementations by the State, and complicate official narratives about contemporary conflicts in Colombia. They also question the regimes of representation posited by numerous intellectuals and artists who propose catastrophic narratives of national history. By focusing on the ethical dimensions of witnessing and remembering, by reflecting about the place of language in violent situations, by emphasizing the complex process of making sense of contemporary history and working through traumatic or painful pasts, and by exposing the agency and resistance of subjects in the face of victimhood and loss, these texts counter pervasive essentialist narratives of disaster and monolithic formulations of violence. They thus expose the linguistic, ethical and gender and sexual dimensions of subjectivity in spaces of crisis providing new and productive analytical frameworks that are crucial for the intellectual debates in contemporary Colombia. |
