UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines the images, imaginaries, and aesthetic principles through which Colombian art and monumentalization practices have come to grips with the nation's internal armed conflict over the past three decades. This period witnessed an orchestrated and hitherto unparalleled mobilization of national and international tools of liberal governance in the interest of bringing the conflict to a halt. In spite of such efforts, massacres, human rights abuses, and forced displacements reached unprecedented levels by the late 1990s, intensified by a deepened alliance of armed violence and economic enterprise that accompanied post-Cold War neoliberal capitalist expansion. Analyzing art, museum cultures, architectural forms, and urban development practices from this period, the dissertation explores the tension between the political investment in modern technologies of rights and the palpable exhaustion of modern frameworks for resolving the nation's crisis of violence.

As elsewhere, the discourse of human rights has been invoked in Colombia as a primary regulative technology for restoring the humanity of social body, and "reordering the disorder" of the political body. Other Transitions reads aesthetic productions against a range of human rights policies and practices--international humanitarian law, transitional justice measures, human rights protest genres, and urban renewal policies aimed at "humanizing" the city--in order to gain a more holistic understanding of the fashioning of this "crisis of the human." Through a confrontation with the aesthetic, affective, and epistemological forms that comprise the scaffolding of the normative imaginaries of human rights, each of the works examined analyzes the limits of the emancipatory promise of rights, with a focus on representations of victimhood and available strategies for empathy, solidarity, and identification.

"Other transitions," I argue, are political transitions that are elusive, deferred, and impossible to realize within the existing regime of modern globality. If the post-dictatorship shifts of the 1980s and 1990s marked a turning point in the convergence of neoliberalism and democracy in Latin America, Colombia's suspended transition to "peace" necessitates a return to discussions of "transitions" beyond modern frameworks. Reading cultural texts as an archive of this political impasse, my project thus reopens the question of what kinds of transitions are possible and necessary in this historical moment.