McCune Room, HSSB 6020
Join us for a talk by Dr. Tathagatan Ravindran (University of Guadalajara, BAOBAB Center). In 2021, Colombia witnessed a massive insurrection against neoliberal policies that paralyzed the country for about three months. Cali was the epicenter of the insurrection, as points of blockade were established throughout the city. The insurrection had a major impact on the future of the country, such as the politicization of large sectors of urban youth, the emergence of new social leaders, and the election of the first leftist government in the country’s history. Even after the insurrection, the points of blockade and public spaces in the city became sites for the preservation of the social memory of struggle. The elites and the new right-wing local administration have sought to erase that collective memory by covering the murals with uniform coats of grey paint, while activists persistently return to restore and repaint them in the same sites.
This contest over memory between local elites and activists has unfolded alongside internal struggles among the latter over how the insurrection should be symbolically represented. Afro-descendant, feminist, and LGBTQ groups have denounced the reproduction of racial, patriarchal, and heteronormative hegemony within both the mobilization process and its symbolic representations. As the insurrection in Cali brought together diverse social sectors yet also revealed internal frictions, it offers a particularly generative ethnographic site for advancing theoretical reflections on intersectional justice in social movement praxis.
This talk draws on an activist research project to create a repository of oral narratives and audiovisual material on the memory of the insurrection. It discusses the participatory strategies used to create knowledge in a collaborative fashion, putting academic knowledge in dialogue with the knowledge that emerges in the trenches of struggle, and generating dialogues and debates on the question of intersectional frictions in processes of mobilization.