Emplotting Nonviolence in Colombian Autobiographies

How do individuals upholding an ethos of nonviolence tell their life narratives in places ravaged by armed conflict? With an understanding of violence and nonviolence as socially contingent concepts, Emplotting Nonviolence in Colombian Autobiographies focuses on the life writings of three Colombian social movement leaders (the U’wa Esperanza-Aguablanca’s Tengo los pies en la cabeza, the Afrocolombian Rudecindo Castro’s Calle caliente, and the LGBTQ] artivist Manuel Antonio Velandia’s De homosexual a marica sujeto de derechos) and contrasts them with the memoirs of a hegemonic ex-president (Álvaro Uribe’s No Lost Causes). These autobiographies are analyzed using a ＂contextual narratology of contingency＂. This is a narrative approach that examines ＂emplotment＂ --the structuring of storytelling sequences and its narrative devices-- in the light of historical literary genres. Moreover, through a context-sensitive literary lens, this approach emphasizes each book’s rhetoric of group-oriented self-representation, or ＂collective narration＂ and the way literary genres inflect the representation of nonviolence.

Juan Camilo Brigard is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. His research focuses on the intersection of Colombian and postcolonial literature, textual criticism, performance, and the politics of aesthetics.