Description
- Abstract:
- “Codes of Silence” studies contemporary literature and film that responds to the internal armed conflict between guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and the state in Colombia throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In light of the decades-long lifespan of the conflict, this project examines novels, memoirs, and films that feature intergenerational family narratives in order to explore how the lingering effects of trauma and loss can shape the evolution of family histories. Here, the family serves as a social space that microcosmically represents the nation, inviting an analysis of how family secrets speak toward crucial gaps in national narratives of conflict. With particular attention to stories confronting the absence of a patriarch, “Codes of Silence” examines how authors and filmmaker Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Daniela Abad, Juan Cárdenas, Carolina Sanín, Pilar Quintana, Gloria Susana Esquivel and Ingrid Rojas Contreras present moments of silence in their works as catalysts for reimagining familial bonds, inheritance, and identity. In their works, the absence, rejection or replacement of a patriarchal figure results in narrative silences that open spaces within which the marginalized voices of female and child protagonists are free to speak of long-overlooked histories of familial turmoil. In order to explore the family as a microcosm of the nation, this dissertation gives special consideration to works that turn to rural regions of the country, where the predominance of Afro-Colombian communities and non-Western belief systems challenge normative familial bonds and complicate notions of a homogenous national identity. To this end, the analysis proposes silence as a form of storytelling that invites experimental forms of narration, such as aurality and polyphony, which are especially useful for communicating marginalized peoples’ relationships to civil conflict and its afterlives in Colombia.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2022
Citation
Hunt, Mai,
"Codes of Silence: Contemporary Family Narratives of the Colombian Armed Conflict"
(2022).
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:y55x2rr9/
Relations
Collection:
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Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department....