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Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia): An interdisciplinary approach
Edited by Armin Schwegler, Bryan Kirschen and Graciela Maglia
[Contact Language Library 54] 2017
► pp. 147–182

Chapter 4
Cultural Text, Aesthetic Resistance, and Oral Literature in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia)

This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to the oral tradition of San Basilio de Palenque (henceforth Palenque). Seeking to establish relationships between the oral literature and the culture of Palenque, this paper analyzes textual productions collected during fieldwork between 2008 and 2010. These texts are considered in terms of their cultural and geohistorical meanings, their locus of enunciation (eccentric, invisibilized, and exoticized by Colombia’s white/lettered discourse), as well as their relationship to Colombia’s national literary production and postcolonial Afrodiasporic discourses in the Americas. The study examines texts obtained by the author in Palenque. This corpus is complemented by secondary published sources in the fields of linguistics and literature. These include autobiographic testimonies, traditional stories, songs, as well as performances by native singers (popular songs). The article then studies how Palenque’s oral literature problematizes the canonic concept of Literature and Authorship, and how this literature can serve as an example of intellectual maroonage when local oral literature transgresses the colonial codes in an attempt to establish its own concept of freedom. This study also shows how certain aspects of peripheral Latin American modernity are superimposed on a basic pre-modern organization. It concludes by arguing that the oral literature of Palenque can be analyzed as a creolized expression of the colonial encounter. Palenque’s most visible cultural product is its unique Afro-Hispanic creole language – the vivid voice of a hybrid Latin America.

Keywords: Afro-Caribbean, creolization, cultural text, diaspora, invisibilization, literary field, oral literature, Palenque, postcolonial
Article outline
  • 0.Introduction: Exotic, invisible, raizal, Other
  • 1.Historical silence, scholarly accounts and (re)invention of collective memory
  • 2.From zombification of vernacular society to maroonage as a transcultural focus
  • 3.From linguistic marginality to global recognition: Palenque’s creole continuum
  • 4.Palenque: Creolized expression of the post-colonial Caribbean
  • 5.Identity, diaspora and (cultural) nation in the cartography of orality
  • 6.Between popular culture, popular art and performance
  • 7.The oxymoron of Palenque: Traditional society in the face of modernity
  • 8.From mythical memory and memoranda to mnemotropism and heritage
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.54.04mag
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