@book{publication-6577,
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  isbn = {ISBN: 9781041135364 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003670247 (ebk) / DOI: 10.4324/9781003670247 / hardback and ebook},
  series = {Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature},
  url = {https://www.routledge.com/Emplotting-Nonviolence-in-Colombian-Autobiographies/Brigard/p/book/9781041135364},
  address = {New York and London},
  title = {Emplotting Nonviolence in Colombian Autobiographies},
  author = {Juan Camilo Brigard},
  abstract = {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.

===

1.     Introduction: A Nonviolent Approach to Colombian Cultural Violentology. 5
1.1.       Autobiography as an Interface Between Aesthetics and Politics. 11
1.2.       Violence and Nonviolence. 19
1.3.       A Contextual Narratology of Contingency. 25
2.     The Thrills of “Democratic Security”: Uribe Vélez’s No Lost Causes. 34
2.1.       A Heterobiographical Presidential Memoir-Thriller 35
2.1.1.        A Presidential Memoir-Thriller 35
2.1.2.        The Thriller-like Emplotment of No Lost Causes. 40
2.1.3.        Suspense, Talking Duels and a Polarized Reception. 47
2.1.4.        Uribe’s Heterobiographical Voice: Hollywoodization as Suture and Neoliberal Synergy. 49
2.2.       A Criollo Colonial Heritage: A Nuclear Family and a Neoliberal Colombia. 54
2.2.1.        Screening Fear Through a Criollo Nuclear Family. 55
2.2.2.        Ventriloquizing Collectivity in a Democracy of Absentees. 59
2.2.3.        A Colombia Shaped by an Imperial Vision. 66
2.3.       Pierced Nonviolence. 71
2.3.1.        The State’s License to Kill 71
2.3.2.        Pierced Nonviolence: Pacification. 78
2.3.3.        First as Presidential Memoir-Thriller, then as Tragedy?. 81
3.     Embodying a Mythical Realist Transfiguration: Berichá’s Tengo los pies en la cabeza. 87
3.1.       A Mythical Realist Autoethnography. 88
3.1.1.        Mythical Realism.. 89
3.1.2.        A Transcultural Memoir 93
3.1.3.        Myths: From the Origin of the World to the U’wa Present 98
3.1.4.        Ethnographic Realism.. 99
3.1.5.        A Mythical Realist Autoethnography. 102
3.2.       Rearticulating Body-Politics and Political Bodies: Berichá’s Adoptive Families, the U’wa, and the National Imaginary. 105
3.2.1.        From Evangelized Indigenous Woman to U’wa Author 109
3.2.2.        From a Monocultural to a Multicultural Colombia. 113
3.2.3.        An Anthropomorphized U’wa Collectivity. 119
3.3.       Nonviolent Mythical Inflections of the Real 121
3.3.1.        Mythical Realist Transfigurations of Violence. 123
3.3.2.        Mythical Realist Nonviolence. 128
3.3.3.        A Sense of Belonging in Rejection. 136
4.     Ethnicization as Tragedy: Rudecindo Castro’s Calle caliente. 143
4.1.       A Heterobiography in the Tragic Form.. 144
4.2.       Narrating Afro-Diasporic Heritage. 164
4.2.1.        A Lineage of Afrocolombian Matrifocal Families. 165
4.2.2.        Dialogic Hetero-Self-Citation: Collectivization and Social Disintegration. 170
4.2.3.        A Historically Indebted Colombia: Traditional Historiography Under Afrocolombian Eyes. 175
4.3.       Tragic Nonviolence. 180
4.3.1.        Tragic Nonviolence in Calle caliente. 183
4.3.2.        A Skeptical Take on Tragedy as a Way of Conclusion. 189
5.     Loca Mariquita’s Apprenticeship: Manuel Antonio Velandia’s De homosexual a marica sujeto de derechos. 197
5.1.       An ‘Autobioethnography’ of Bildung. 197
5.1.1.        A Bildung-Autobioethnography. 197
5.1.2.        Affirmative and Disillusionment Bildungsromane: Personality Development, Responsibilization and Incorporation. 201
5.1.3.        The Developmental Linearity of Velandia’s Life Story. 203
5.1.4.        Velandia’s Apprenticeship. 205
5.2.       From a Catholic Nuclear Family to a Marica Colombia. 210
5.2.1.        From a Catholic Nuclear Family to a Marica Subject of Rights  210
5.2.2.        From Catholic Missionary to LGBTQ+ Politician. 215
5.2.3.        Narrative Strategies of a Minoritarian Hyperbolic-I 219
5.2.4.        From a Catholic to a Queer Cosmopolitan Colombia. 223
5.3.       Bildung for Nonviolence 227
5.3.1.        Treating People as if They Were Trash. 227
5.3.2.        Bildung for Nonviolence: Queer Humor Facing Death Threats. 229
5.3.3.        Towards a Self-Ironic Collective Memory?. 235
6.     Seizing the Nonviolent Occasion. 241
6.1.       A Multidirectional Reading of Political Identities. 242
6.2.       Pragmatic and Literary Genres in Comparison. 252
6.3.       Heterobiographical Narratives. 257
6.4.       Intertwined Narrating Selves and Experiencing-Is: Retrojection, Liminality, Linear-Developmentalism.. 258
6.5.       Families: Nuclear, Unipersonal, Extended, Adoptive. 262
6.6.       Compositional Strategies of Individualized Collectivization: Polyphony, Hetero-Self-Citation, Dialogic Hetero-Self-Citation, Illeism, and Self-Citation. 265
6.7.       Colombographies. 267
6.8.       Violence: Crosshatched Processual and Physical Injury vs. Enmeshment within Processual Harm.. 272
6.9.       Emplotting Nonviolence. 276
6.10.         Beyond These Nonviolent Narratives: Routes for Future Research  279

Works Cited. 290

Index},
  keywords = {Colombia,Narratology,Genres,Autobiography,Nonviolence,Literaturwissenschaft,Medien-/Kulturwissenschaft,Spanisch},
}
