Emplotting Nonviolence in Colombian Autobiographies

Juan Camilo Brigard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040618202
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: A Nonviolent Approach to Colombian Cultural Violentology
• 2 The Thrills of “Democratic Security”: Uribe Vélez’s No Lost Causes
• 3 Embodying a Mythical Realist Transfiguration: Berichá’s Tengo los pies en la cabeza
• 4 Ethnicization as Tragedy: Rudecindo Castro’s Calle caliente
• 5 Loca Mariquita’s Apprenticeship: Manuel Antonio Velandia’s De homosexual a marica sujeto de derechos
• 6 Seizing the Nonviolent Occasion
• 7 Epilogue: Nonviolence as an Emblem
• Works Cited
• Index