Paper/Proposal Title

Vivir sabroso: Cultural rights against neoliberal development in the Colombian Pacific

Presenter/Author Information

Carlos Gardeazabal Bravo PhD, University of DaytonFollow

Location

M2225

Start Date

November 2023

End Date

November 2023

Keywords

Cultural Rights, Neoliberalism

Abstract

In a historic decision, sentence of the Constitutional Court of Colombia (2016) declared the Atrato River as a subject of rights. The Atrato is the first river in Colombia to be declared as such. This new kind of legal figure was the product of a long process led by the ethnic-territorial communities throughout the Atrato basin with an organization called dignified land (Tierra Digna) as well as a form of life and action named Vivir sabroso. In this presentation, I explore how Vivir sabroso helps to think and act to dismantle the necropolitical spaces of closure and exclusion that operate in this Colombian region. This concept works as a counter-discourse for the systemic violence that has been articulated through the exclusionary walls of race, social class, and gender but also developmentalism. In dialogue with N. Quiceno Toro, A. Mbembe, and A. Escobar, I explore how Vivir sabroso not only neutralizes the complexities of violence and trauma in the region but also provides discursive agency to marginalized groups and a frame for actions focused in the protection of life. For this purpose, I analyze how these afrocolombian, indigenous, and mestizo communities employ their worldview in their daily struggles, opposing solidarity in action and the affirmation of cultural rights to neoliberal developmental discourses and violences.

Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)

Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo’s scholarship intersects contemporary Latin American literature and film, the cultural politics of emotion, human rights narratives, ecocriticism, and critical theory. Examples of such intersections are the co-edited volume (with Kevin Guerrieri) Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production: Embodied Enactments (Routledge 2022) and two academic dossiers published last year on humanitarianism and representations of violence. Gardeazabal Bravo is currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Dayton’s Department of Global Languages and Cultures, where he collaborates in the Latinx and Latin American Studies program. He teaches a wide variety of courses on Latin American culture, human rights narratives, and race and ethnic studies. He received his Ph.D. in Spanish studies specializing in Latin American Literature, and a Graduate Certificate in Human Rights from the University of Connecticut (2018). Prior to this, he earned an MA in Hispanic Linguistics from the Instituto Caro y Cuervo and a BA in philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Comments

This presentation was directly inspired by the Action Research and Rights Collective 2023 Workshop.