In Afterlives of Discovery, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes traces global and national histories as they entangle through the concept and material life of Discovery across Colombia's evolution into a liberal settler colonial state. Rather than seeing Discovery as a singular event or bygone era, rhodes theorizes Discovery as a globally encompassing, racialized formation of domination and geographic speculation that continues to structure settler colonialism. Discovery's logics, they argue, are rooted in colonial and capitalist fantasies projected onto the racialized space and place of the colonized other. rhodes draws on critical theory, human rights research, and Colombian archives to challenge dominant narratives that maintain the Colombian armed conflict began as a Marxist insurgency in 1964. Instead, rhodes shows that the conflict is an extension of Discovery's ongoingness via projects of dispossession, extraction, whitening, and epistemic and political hegemony. Given that Colombia's national past, present, and future are grounded in Discovery, rhodes asks: How is it possible to build futures that escape Discovery's grasp?
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College and author of The Inheritance of Haunting.
Preface xi Introduction. Speculative Imaginaries in the Afterlives of Discovery: Space-Time (Con)Fabulations 1 1. Figuring Discovery and Dominium: A Lingering Mytho-Poetics and Property Regime 37 2. Writing the Earth into the World: Speculative Geography and the Emplacement of Settler Futurity 75 3. Settler Horizons, Colonizing Affects: Repetitions in the Archive and the Psychosocial Mapping of Colombian National Identity 106 4. Rediscovery in the Light of the Future: Territorialization and the Demographic Catastrophe in Colombian Geographic Speculation 135 5. Corpus Nullius and the Traffick in Blood: Biocolonialism and Human Futurity in the Afterlives of Discovery 152 Coda. Un futuro sin conquistadores (A Future Without Conquistadores) 192 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 209 Bibliography 255 Index 275
"Afterlives of Discovery is a forceful and evocative historical genealogy of the current social and political order of violence in Colombia. Through the framework of the afterlife of the Age of Discovery, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes powerfully reckons with the legacies of Colombian white supremacy and its parallel false prophet of liberal progress." - Yesenia Barragan, author of (Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific) "Afterlives of Discovery offers an innovative perspective for interpreting the link between coloniality, capitalism, racism, and violence against the colonized in Colombia. In this theoretically sophisticated and beautifully written book, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes documents how Discovery invented the Americas, rendering the Western hemisphere as an aspiration for unlimited accumulation conducive to the appropriation and dispossession of land and bodies. Discovery, rhodes shows, continues to perpetuate coloniality and haunt political life in the Americas in twenty-first-century late liberalism." - Cristina Rojas, author of (Civilization and Violence: Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia)
