Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-02T02:59:54.643Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Beauty Queens and Theme Parks: Coffee Culture in Contemporary Colombia

from Part Three - Body and Gender Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2018

Stacey L. Hunt
Affiliation:
Auburn University
Andrea Fanta Castro
Affiliation:
Florida International University
Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Chloe Rutter-Jensen
Affiliation:
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Get access

Summary

Most scholars presume that Colombians have a weak national identity that remains “under construction” and undermines political efforts at state construction (Gonzalez; Bushnell). For example, Fischer states that “the Colombian state is weak because of the weak articulation of the Colombian nation” (186). Political elites are blamed for failing to articulate a strong national identity or produce symbols of national unity (Pecaut; Palacios and Safford; Sousa Santos and Garcia Villegas). This elite failure is said to have resulted in a “fragmented” nation, with people identifying first and foremost with a region or political party instead of the nation-state (Gonzalez, Bolivar, and Vasquez). This “incomplete construction of national identity” is thought to have impeded the state from transcending either geographic or social boundaries (Rodriguez, Garcia-Villegas, and Uprimny, 138).

Explaining Colombian state failure through national failure, however, is a tautological argument. Moreover, it does not shed light into what kinds of collective imaginings Colombians do share. Rather than relying on binary conceptions of national identity as absent or present, I seek to describe the quality and content of at least one component of contemporary Colombian collective imagining. Nation-states are not simply authored by political elite or imaged through print capitalism; the consumption of material commodities, images, and symbols also constructs national identity (Coronil; Anderson). Spectacles invite people to participate in the construction of political power while allowing for contradiction, repetition, the omission of inconvenient truths, partial truth telling, and various interpretations. Gender and the nuclear family provide some of the most easily imitated and elastic scripts for official performances that establish the protocol for public conduct and practices of national belonging, particularly in moments of crisis (Caldeira; Taylor; Wedeen; Norton; McClintock; Butler). Recurrence of these familiar tropes is particularly depoliticizing, naturalizing political decisions and power imbalances.

In this chapter, I argue that Colombians have constructed a collective national identity based on the consumption of coffee culture. Rituals of coffee culture invite citizens to engage in easily recognizable and widely reproduced performances of national belonging. Nationally, the spectacle of the coffee economy unites fragmented regional identities behind the image of one common coffee culture that is marked by the absence of historic inequities. In the first section, I discuss the origins and collapse of the coffee state.

Type
Chapter
Information
Territories of Conflict
Traversing Colombia through Cultural Studies
, pp. 175 - 188
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×