Aparicio Cultural Studies

Juan Ricardo Aparicio
CULTURAL STUDIES IN COLOMBIA

Cartographies of encounters, tensions and
conjunctures
Downloaded by [Pontificia Universidad Javeria] at 12:54 22 January 2014
This article presents an always risky cartography of the institutionalization of the

field of Cultural Studies in Colombia in the 1990s. The article starts with a
personal narration on how the author was introduced to this novel field by
entering the first graduate programme in Cultural Studies in Colombia. Here, it
locates the major tensions, stereotypes and loud silences characteristic of the social
sciences in Colombia in which this institutionalization was infused and also
threatened by the 1990s. But far from thinking that this recent event inaugurated
an intellectual project thanks to the importation of theories and methodologies at
this moment, the article describes previous intellectual traditions like the one
influenced by the works of Orlando Fals Borda that had challenged positivist and
neutral intellectual approaches to major problems in Colombia. Also, it highlights
the influence that the work of Jesus Martn Barbero had through his paramount
work on media and mediation since the 1970s. Afterwards, the article succinctly
contextualizes the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in the 1990s through
the emergence of the Ministry of Culture and the multicultural mantra and a
whole scholarly and states concern for cultural industries and culture policies.
Finally, it describes the perverse confluences between these new events and the
arrival of neoliberal policies that had radically changed and challenged
Colombian public and private universities. The article concludes with a
contrasting image between a multiplication of interests, programmes, departments,
conferences and publications in Cultural Studies in the larger universities in
Colombia and their rampant transformation through the new scripts of audit
cultures, indexation and the whole quantification of knowledge production.
Keywords academic disciplines; conjunctures; Estudios Culturales;

Cultural Studies; institutionalization; neoliberalism; Colombia
Introduction
In a key article intended to grasp the specificity of the intellectual trajectories
of Cultural Studies, Grossberg (1997, p. 244) starts his argument with a
Cultural Studies Vol. 26, No. 1 January 2012, pp. 3961
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.642560
40 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
paradoxical enunciation: the absence of any definition becomes key to

understanding its nature. Despite the different reactions that this argument
might provoke, the author defends his introductory statements by employing a
further argument throughout the article: the inescapable need always to
contextualize our intellectual projects according to the answers, problems and
methodologies sought, as well as our desire to transform complex and diverse
social and cultural hierarchies (see also Mato 2002). Grossberg argues, further,
that this burden implies that the definition of the intellectual and political
project behind Cultural Studies is intrinsically mobile, constantly refashioned
within an ever-changing set of questions and answers, problematic, and
contexts: that it matters. And it is to be hoped that, while recognizing the
complex ways in which the label of Estudios Culturales Cultural Studies has
become fashionable enough in Colombia for undergraduate and graduate
departments in Colombia to mushroom in less than seven years, we will
be able to create more critical agendas than the ones merely imposed by the
radical transformation of the universities in the country during the same
period. And even though these vectors and this array of desires and frustrations
within the established disciplines have placed Cultural Studies strategically at
the core of the larger public and private universities, I remain interested in
retaining Grossbergs (1997) call to reaffirm the Cultural Studies project per
se: that is, that what we do matters within the economic, political and cultural
formations, contexts, conjunctures and contingencies of Colombia and Latin
America.
Certainly, many pages could be written on what exactly Grossberg meant
by his statement that the Cultural Studies project or its definition matters. How
does it matter? What matters? Why does it matter? Who matters? Indeed,
radically different intellectual and political projects may proceed depending on
the answers to these questions. This article does not and will not explore this
aspect. However, it will enquire into the different answers these questions
have received in Colombia and that have become definitive landmarks in the
provisional (and very risky) cartography I am attempting to provide here of the
history of Cultural Studies in Colombia, and more specifically, of its rapid
academic institutionalization in the country. Nor do I wish to claim that many
of the central points on the trajectory I outline were necessarily considered by
their authors to be contributions to the Cultural Studies field, or conversation.
Quite the opposite in fact: both in the Latin American and Colombian
academic fields it is much more common to encounter a rejection of the
Cultural Studies label, for many different kinds of reason (Mato 2000). These
include the rejection of other intellectual practices outside the immediate
academic site, the marginalization of previous Latin American academic
traditions and dependency on metropolitan academic ones and the increasing
academic focus and the consequent depolitization of the intellectual project
(Mato 2000). And even though the usual suspects (yes, the hard core
disciplines of the social sciences) have spearheaded these debates in papers,
C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S I N C O L O M B I A 41
conferences and in the corridors of many universities, the fact is that the rapid
institutionalization of Cultural Studies in undergraduate and graduate
programmes poses crucial questions and implies serious paradoxes not only
because of Grossbergs admonition, but in general, for the contemporary
intellectual projects in Colombia that wish to stick with the label.
The article starts by offering a brief description of the frustrations that the
cohort of students I formed a part of felt while undertaking our undergraduate
studies and the reading assigned us. Succinctly, it describes the readings,
problems, loud silences, internal colonialisms and provincialisms that
characterized our vivid debates. It also refers to the larger context of the
rapid transformation affecting the public and private universities in the country
and how these converged with the establishment of new networks with PhD
and Masters programmes overseas. This section also indicates unacknow-
ledged critical and intellectual traditions that not only made it harder for public
intellectuals to perform a neutral role, but also expanded the range of what
were considered serious research objects, introducing topics such as popular
culture, media and globalization to academic study in Colombia.
The second section follows some of these trends to set out the contours of
the discussion concerning the possibility of developing a Cultural Studies
conversation in Colombia. Quite clearly, as Martn-Barbero (1997, p. 53), one
of the central actors of this story has highlighted, Latin America [and
Colombia] did not adopt Cultural Studies once it had become a fashionable
label; it has a very long and different history. This section discusses the
previous traditions of critical thinking in Colombia that the Cultural Studies
conversations encountered soon after they became institutionalized. I would
argue that although trends in popular education were crucial for these
encounters when they were finally occurred in Colombia, they were in no way
similar to the approach developed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in the UK,1 which was aimed at a
particular pool of students that included workers, professionals, teachers and
so on. As I describe in the following sections, this conversation has been
institutionalized in the larger public and private universities in Colombia right
from the beginning.
By illustrating the efforts of individual scholars and the organization of
conferences and research centres, I also attempt to delineate the most
important networks that spearheaded this academic institutionalization in the
country. I am interested in showing how these articulations forged in different
moments and institutions were significant in orienting the problems, research
agendas and methodologies that Cultural Studies programmes have undertaken
from their origins until today. In my conclusions, I discuss what I consider to
be the potential for cross-dialogues between different focuses of critical
thinking and action both in Latin America and elsewhere, and in the academic
and non-academic worlds. I am aware of the dangers of setting Cultural Studies
up as everything and nothing. But I want to insist on the tremendous
opportunity that our research and our intellectual, political and pedagogical
projects signify for Colombia if we are to be able to draw from different
literatures and areas of knowledge and encounter the best intellectual tools
with which to diagnose and transform social, cultural and economic
hierarchies. Thus, moving away from a stable definition of the Cultural
Studies project in Colombia, I wish to examine the potential that these
different conversations might have both for theorizing power structures and
their residues and for advancing critical pedagogical projects within and outside
the academic site in Colombia.
The notorious postmodern debate in Colombia

I speak as a member of a generation of students that, as young undergraduates
at the end of the 1990s, received its initial exposure to literature outside the
cluster of canonical texts habitually assigned in social sciences departments.
We studied at private universities, generally in anthropology departments,
where we experienced a sense of generational bias and frustration at the
literature and research projects that were legitimized by our disciplines. My
location was even more paradoxical, as I studied within the archaeology
programme that formed a part of the larger Department of Anthropology at
the Universidad de Los Andes. There, Cristobal Gnecco, a new professor who
came from the public University of the Cauca in the south-western city of
Popayan started teaching a course on Archaeology and Multivocality. It was
the first time I had been assigned readings by Foucault, Jameson, Lyotard,
Feyerabend and so on, together with discussions spearheaded by post-
processual archaeologists such as Ian Hodder, Christopher Tilley and Daniel
Miller. Yes, we had had our Marx in the first years of undergraduate studies,
but not much of Gramsci or Althusser or the neo Marxists, not to mention
someone like Stuart Hall. Surprisingly, a Colombian anthropologist, Arturo
Escobar, someone we had barely heard of, was quoted by George Marcus
(1995) one of the apostles of the postmodernism debate through his classic co-
edited Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) in his article on the multi-
sited ethnography.
The translation of Escobars Encountering Development (1995) in 1996 was
very significant to our debates and also for Colombia anthropology. Several
collections of books and research agendas produced by the Colombian Institute
of Anthropology were labelled under the guise of the anthropology of
modernity. These developed many of Escobars insights for approaching what
were, for us, new research objects, such as the State, the development
apparatus, discourse, social movements and globalization (Uribe and Restrepo
1997, Archila and Pardo, 2001). Perhaps because of the violence that affected
the whole country and made long-term fieldwork almost impossible, perhaps
because we rejected the traditional study of exotic objects and people that had
been the norm in Colombian anthropology, or perhaps simply because we
were fascinated by the novelty of these approaches when compared with the
rigid customary division between disciplines, we embraced these new
perspectives together with a very superficial initial reading of Foucault and
other metropolitan authors. And very certainly, at that time, we had read very
little of the rich and complex Latin American intellectual tradition, with the
exception of one or two brief mentions of Orlando Fals Bordas (1979, 1981,
1984, 1986) four volume work on the Double History of Colombias
Caribbean Coastal Region (Historia Doble de la Costa) and Jesus Martn
Barberos De los medios a las mediaciones (1987). I read Nestor Garca Canclinis
Culturas Hbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1989) during my
class on Peasants while studying for my undergraduate degree, and
enthusiastically appreciated how neglected objects of study such as popular
cultures, artisan products and museums could also become full-blown
anthropological objects if the researcher was prepared to move away from
the binary notions of tradition and modernity.
But though it remained true that at this point the Colombian under-
graduate programme consisted of an intense training in the discipline that
lasted five years, academic, our academic careers only really began in the last
years of our undergraduate studies. Many of our central reading assignments
(e.g. Writing Culture) had been published almost 10 years previously, while
others were merely superficial caricatures. We were starting to discuss
problems concerning the politics of the past, state and nation-making
processes, heritage issues and ideology. As undergraduate students of
anthropology, we were also concerned with steering the traditional study of
Colombian anthropology away from indigenous studies to something different
that we had not quite identified but that we felt sure would involve the
fashionable worlds of power, regimes of truth, postmodernism and processes
of normalization. I can still remember how from the windows of their
classroom the hard-line archaeology undergraduates threw sheets of paper at
us, covered with information about the Sokal affair, the science wars and so
on. We did not understand exactly what those flying accusations were all
about. In this very provincial academic environment, we believed that we
were the only ones reading this avant-garde and that we were living through
our own local version of the science wars. I believed or was made to believe (I
cannot remember which) that the older faculty members at our university, and
even more the teaching staff at the public universities, were still unhealthily
dominated by figures we characterized as old Marxists or liberal positivists.
Not surprisingly, we neglected (or did not even read) the work of
Colombian anthropologists such as Luis Guillermo Vasco, who had already said
and written many things about his experiences working with indigenous
movements in the 1970s and 1980s (Vasco 2002), that resonated with our own
novel and exciting discoveries. Not to mention the effort of many
anthropologists who had connected their study of indigenous groups with
issues of violence, modernization, globalization and so on (Correa 1993). We
were repeatedly scolded for reading postmodernism; worse: for being bourgeois and
postmodern. Needless to say, at that time, we had not figured out the different
legacies and radical distinctions between these debates (the postmodern debate)
and the more rigorous and material research agenda that characterized the
Birmingham Cultural Studies tradition (Grossberg 1996). But the postmodern
label has stayed in place until today and has been used erroneously by
academics to characterize poststructural agendas such as that of Arturo Escobar
(see Figueroa 2009) among others, whose work has been focused precisely on
the material and real effects of the development apparatus. But in the corridors
of many social science departments in Colombia, the term postmodern would be
used to describe and to stereotype many of the vectors I will set out over the
following pages.
I want to underscore how these readings and discussions also spearheaded
processes of (self or collective) identification that constructed enemies and
adversaries by recourse to long periods of loud silence. It was more a sense of
pride than of mature and well established research agendas, of dialogue with
students in other programmes or of projects what we were seeking to advance.
And more, as one learned over the years, these debates were advancing in the
complete absence, or in conscious ignorance of, previous critical intellectual
traditions that had developed in different places, and even in Colombia. And
from the moment in which we were exposed to these new literatures, some
students began to look for Masters or PhD programmes overseas to continue
developing their insights. This search coincided with the overall restructuring
processes that our private university was undergoing and that in a couple of
years would extend to other private and public universities as well. This
process included, among other radical transformations, the need to increase
the number of staff within the faculty pool with PhDs. As there were just a few
or no graduate programmes with the exception of the recognized PhD
programme in History at the largest public university, the Universidad Nacional
and it was more or less difficult to find grants and fellowships, many of my
cohort of students emigrated, to start their graduate studies in the US and the
UK. I was to take that path almost 10 years later. In the meantime, with the
new desires and expectations about the need to undertake graduate studies that
were starting to extend to a whole generation of middle, upper-middle and
upper class students, I had to wait for a couple of years so that something that
seemed to be what we were looking for appeared in Colombia. This did not
necessarily need to be something with the cultural studies label, but it was
important that it had some sort of connection with the major authors we were
proud of having read and who we characterized as postmodern.
Old and new articulations: the committed intellectual

tradition and the critique of social sciences
Needless to say, this very parochial and provincial history, which is
characteristic of Colombian academia with very few processes of dialogue
and almost as few research agendas. This situation persists today; it is a clear
distorting factor, and at times results in blindness to the range of extremely
rich and mature research initiatives developed in other Colombian academic
institutions. But almost at the same time, we were exposed to these new
reading, to national and international congresses and networks of international
and national scholars that had already established the Cultural Studies label in the
country. Spearheaded in the main by individual faculty and independent

research centres within the larger universities, several congresses and
symposiums had already begun to advance critiques of the established
disciplines and epistemologies of the social sciences long before we took our
classes. Most of these initiatives did not use the Cultural Studies label at all; but
their critique of the established social sciences and humanities converted them
into landmarks of the kind of intellectual work I am interested in delineating
here. For example, there was a long-established tradition of the committed-
intellectual established with the foundation of the Sociology Department at the
Universidad Nacional (National University) by Orlando Fals Borda and the
radical priest Camilo Torres in 1958. From this point on, against the parochial
views of the infamous period known as La Violencia (19461958), they
launched the first major empirical book on violence in Colombia, which
questioned many of the silences and arguments that were employed in an
attempt to explain this violence (Guzman et al. 2005a, 2005b). The book
narrated the horrible massacres, rapes and displacements of the period, which
had been left unregistered in the official memory of Colombians. In the second
volume the authors discussed many of the intense and often violent reactions
that the first volume had generated in the public sphere, amongst political
parties, in the academy and in government sectors (Guzman et al. 2005b, see
also Guzman Campos 2007 for a review of these reactions). For the first time
in the country, the more than 300,000 murders produced by a partisan
violence that had often been ordered to further class and regional conflicts and
to advance the concentration of land in private hands (Bolvar 2003, Gonzalez
et al. 2003), became publicly known, launching furious reactions by
government sectors.
Within this rejection of a passive and neutral social science tradition, one
could also point to the First Symposium on Participatory Action Research held
in Cartagena in 1977. The symposium was organized by Orlando Fals Borda
and a whole network of international and national scholars who had been
involved in similar discussions, including Mohammad Anisar Rahman from
Bangladesh, Rodolfo Stavenhagen from Mexico and Marja Liisa Swant from
Finland (Cendales et al. 2005). The event was repeated 20 years later in 1997,
also in Cartagena, after it had been held every two years in other locations in
different countries. Remembering the discussions in 1977, one commentator
would argue that we had studied sociology or anthropology or economics
(instruments of analysis which we had picked up more or less successfully at
university) but none of these were of the slightest use in our attempts to
understand what was actually happening before our eyes (Molano 1998, p. 5).
He also insisted that as we sat there by the Caribbean, the Social Sciences
were trying to break free of a Positivism without principle and at the same
time become a critical, and thus all embracing, discipline (Molano 1998).
Paulo Freire (1998) sent a message to the 1997 Cartagena session about the
principal problems the participants should deal with: above all we must fight
against the power of the dominant neoliberal ideology that keeps on offending
against and attacking human nature while reproducing itself socially and
historically, threatening dreams, utopias and hopes.
On other fronts, and from the 1970s onwards, Jesus Martn-Barbero had
already established research agendas at the Communications Department of the
Universidad del Valle in the city of Cali, researching popular culture, media and
communication. He would be the head of that department between 1975 and
1995; as he repeated in presentations at several venues, this was the first
department to take Colombian soap operas seriously as powerful narrations of
nation-making processes. All the while, he insisted, the social sciences would
continue to neglect TV and popular culture as serious research objects. As he
explained to the audience when describing his intellectual trajectories in one of
our Cultural Studies colloquiums at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (the
Javeriana) around 2003, he was much influenced during his graduate studies in
Europe by the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams on popular
culture; not to mention of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, and
Gramscis concept of hegemony. Indeed, Barberos influence on the
institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Colombia was materialized several
years later when he headed the Academic Committee of the International
Program of Latin American Cultural Studies launched by the Center for Social
Studies (CES) at the Universidad Nacional in 1997. Under the inspiration of
Carlos Rincon, a Latin-American literature theorist working then, and now, at
the Freie Universtitat in Berlin, this programme (which adopted the Cultural
Studies label) had as its main objective to support and disseminate the
theoretical and methodological innovations of the literary and Cultural Studies
field on an international level (Arango 1998, p. 9).
The Program of Latin American Cultural Studies headed by the CES under
the direction of Martn-Barbero initiated a series of major conferences that
brought international and national scholars together to reflect upon popular
culture, media, cultural industries, globalization, the state and the problem of
regions. Right from the beginning, the programme was well funded by the
larger cultural institutions of the country and the region, including the recently
created Ministry of Culture, Bogotas District Institute of Culture and Tourism,
the Executive Secretary of the Andres Bello Convention, the Luis Angel Arango
Public Library, the Ministry of Education and the Economic Council of the
Presidency of Colombia. Needless to say, this important support from
important cultural institutions established a focus of discussion in Cultural
Studies in which the problems of neoliberal globalization, multiculturalism,
cultural industries and the state received particular emphasis.2 Indeed, these
connections would open up a new space for academics to find a role and
employment outside the academy and to influence public policies, institutional
transformations, budget relocations and so on. As the major transformations
that were occurring in the few large universities in the country had made it
almost impossible to find a stable job within academia, it became increasingly
common to find academics working in non-academic locations, including

NGOs. The first event organized by the Program of Latin American Cultural
Studies, The Situation of Literary and Cultural Studies, was held at the Luis Angel
Arango Public Library in 1996 with the attendance of international scholars such
as Jean Franco, William Rowe and Doris Sommer. In 1997, due to the positive
results of the first event, a second and larger event with the title Culture, Politics
and Modernity was organized, with international scholars such as Beatriz Sarlo,
Nelly Richard, Carlos Monsivais and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht coming to discuss
works in the field of Cultural Studies and communication. A commentator
described the event in the following terms: The results of this second
colloquium exceeded our expectations. With forty one papers and more than
three hundred participants from different universities, and the presence of a
public of different ages and generations . . . the increasing interest in the
problem of culture in the country became clear (Arango 1998, p. 10).
In 1998, a third conference on Culture and Globalization counted with the
participation of international academics such as Martin Hopenhayn, George
Yudice, Renato Ortiz, Hugo Achugar and Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan, alongside
national scholars such as Zandra Pedraza and Ana Mara Ochoa. There was a
certain convergence of disparate positions showed a certain convergence,
including the need to break up or reinvent the traditional modern disciplines, the
need for cross-disciplinary approaches which would make it possible to assess the
new challenges of neoliberal globalization, and to establish new dialogues
outside the university locus (Restrepo and Jaramillo 1998, pp. 1019). Several
books would collect many of the papers given at these conferences (Restrepo
et al. 1998, Martn-Barbero & Lopez de la Roche 1998, Martn-Barbero et al.
1999, Martn-Barbero et al. 2000). Some years later, in 2002, the CES would
organize another event, this time using the label of Cultural Studies, where the
keynote speaker was the Brazilian anthropologist Jesus Jose Carvalho. It was the
first time I was exposed to Stuart Halls classic Representation and Signifying
Practices and Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak?
In the meantime, another research centre at the Universidad Javeriana was in
the process of being organized by young professors who had finished or were
about to finish their graduate studies in the United States and Europe. The
most important role was played by Santiago Castro-Gomez, by that time a

young philosophy professor who was completing his doctorate in Germany. He
came from the ranks of Latin-American philosophy, as he demonstrated clearly
in his 1996 book Crtica de la razon latinoamericana (A Critique of Latin
American Reason, Castro-Gomez 1996). As he explained in an interview about
his own intellectual trajectories, he was called on by the Dean of Philosophy to
start an interdisciplinary group on Latin American philosophy, but the group
failed utterly (Humar 2009). He was, however, about to start something
different with other colleagues: the Instituto Pensar. As he explained in the
interview, a range of Latin American intellectuals including Walter Mignolo,
Enrique Dussel and Roberto Follari was invited to give conferences that would
outline the agendas the research centre would follow, and to convince the
administration of the importance of this institute that existed parallel to the
established disciplines.
Interestingly enough, the Instituto Pensar involved a different strain of
scholars and conversations to those that characterized the events organized
previously by the CES on popular culture, cultural industries and the state.
Other Colombian scholars involved in this effort at the Javeriana were Oscar
Guardiola, Alberto Florez and Carmen Millan-Benavides. Inspired by critical
theory, the Gulbenkian Commission, and an array of Latin-American scholars,
mostly philosophers and literary theorists, they matured a critique of the
established disciplines and epistemologies of the social sciences while advancing
transdisciplinary agendas inspired by postcolonial studies and the emerging
conversation on modernity and coloniality (Castro-Gomez 2000, Quijano
2000). A paramount event entitled La reestructuracion de las ciencias sociales en
America Latina (The Restructuring of the Social Sciences in Latin America) was
organized in October 1999 with the participation of Colombian and
international scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Jesus Martin-Barbero, Edgardo
Ladner, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Ana Mara Ochoa, Jose Antonio Figueroa,
Guillermo Hoyos and Zandra Pedraza, among many others. For Castro-Gomez
(Humar 2009), this event, whose papers were to be published one year later
(Castro-Gomez 2000), became a crucial platform for advancing these debates.
What was particularly decisive about the Instituto Pensar was the fact that it
developed and matured a series of networks, publications and events that
would some years later turn into the first formal Cultural Studies programmes
offered in Colombia. For instance, a key partner in this effort came from the
Center of Latin American Studies at Duke University with which the Instituto
Pensar started a project on the Geopolitics of Knowledge (Castro-Gomez and
Guardiola-Rivera 2000). Mabel Morana, a central figure in the Latin-American
Studies tradition at the University of Pittsburgh, came several times to the
Instituto Pensar to deliver lectures. The PhD programme in Latin American
Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolvar in Quito, headed by
Catherine Walsh would also join the network and establish conversations with
Duke University and the Instituto Pensar. Between 1994 and 1998, a series of
conferences on the genealogies and founding conversations of Latin American

Subaltern Studies were held in different universities in the US and Puerto Rico.
With the publication in 1998, of the first volume of the journal Nepantla, with
articles from John Beverly, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence Grossberg and
Ileana Rodriguez, the intersection between the South-Asian Group and the
nascent Latin American Subaltern Studies group was cemented (Rodrguez
2000, Beverley 2004, Coronil 2008).3 But through the existence of the
creative triangle of Duke, the Instituto Pensar and Simon Bolvar, other authors
such as the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter
Mignolo and Arturo Escobar played a central role displacing the South-Asian
postcolonial trend and cementing the conversation on Modernity, Coloniality
and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.4

For several years now, this articulation with the Quito-Duke-Chapel Hill
conversation has been consolidated through links established by graduate
students, conferences and joint publications, and has played a crucial for some,
even hegemonic role in the conversation about Cultural Studies in Colombia.
Although the Cultural Studies label had been previously used by other
institutional initiatives such as those of the CES at the Universidad Nacional years
before, it was in the Instituto Pensar that the countrys first programme in Cultural
Studies was initially offered. To put it in bold terms, from the study of popular
culture, media, citizenship and globalization, the new trend steered the
discussion towards issues of modernity and coloniality, decolonization and the
geopolitics of knowledge. But as Castro-Gomez explained in the interview
mentioned earlier, the jealousies and internal competition that characterized the
established disciplines were to impose serious limits on this initiative. Because
the internal organization of the university only permitted the research centres to
offer outreach courses and not graduate programmes, the Instituto Pensar decided
to launch a first diploma in Cultural Studies: that is, the first diploma using that
label. The diploma targeted the population in general, and 300 people, including
undergraduate students, activists, community workers and non-specialists,
enrolled. After this successful experience, as Castro-Gomez recalls (Humar
2009), enough synergy had been created for it to be possible to think about a
masters programme in Cultural Studies at the Javeriana.
Unlearning and re-learning Cultural Studies

Culturales
Estudios
At that time in the Faculty of Social Sciences there were some discussions
about launching a doctorate in social science but several years would have to
pass before these plans finally came to fruition in 2009. The dean behind the
proposal was very interested in what was happening in the Instituto Pensar and
soon invited Castro-Gomez to join the Faculty with the mandate of launching a
graduate programme in Cultural Studies (Humar 2009), thus establishing a

simple connection that would set in train the Cultural Studies conversation
within the faculty (Humar 2009). But the fears of the established disciplines
would cause the masters degree to be postponed for some years. The faculty
relieved the pressure for the moment by creating and offering a specialization
(especializacion) in Cultural Studies rather than a full-blown masters. That was
a fairly easy solution, but, as it has been evident in recent faculty searches in
my own department, the difficult part was to find professors in Colombia
capable of teaching a Cultural Studies programme at all. After being rejected
by several national funding agencies for support that would have allowed me to
start my graduate studies overseas, I received by chance a flyer on the
Especializacion en estudios culturales. Although I do not remember the exact visual

language used, the image, the flashy colours and messy images of Che Guevara,
Marx and Simon Bolvar caught my attention immediately, and grabbed me
even more when I started to read the description of the programme.
Castro-Gomez interviewed me personally during the application process
and I registered for a programme that I had not managed to entirely figure out
but that echoed many of my initial insights and curiosities. We were
approximately 1012 students from very different backgrounds, from public
and private universities, graduates in different disciplines in the social sciences
and the humanities. Our classes were taught four days a week from 6:00 to
8:00 pm. Almost all of us had part or full time jobs during the day and could
barely keep up the pace of the reading. Today, I am sure no one exactly knew
what the programme was about. Faculty also came from different backgrounds
and disciplines. No one had a degree in Cultural Studies; the closest would
certainly have been Victor Manuel Rodrguez, who was finishing his PhD on
Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester under the direction
of Douglas Crimp. Right from the beginning, he became crucial at least for me
in my efforts to understand the complexities and sophisticated debates on the
politics of representation and the geopolitics of knowledge. For almost a whole
month, during his course, we sustained a discussion on the basis of readings of
Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak? and Morris Banality in Cultural Studies. Some
years later, Rodriguez would leave the programme to work at Bogotas
District Institute of Culture and Tourism where he sought to advance the
discussion of Cultural Studies within the larger debates on cultural policies and
cultural politics in the city of Bogota.
Meanwhile, Castro-Gomez recruited other faculty members including
Ingrid Bolvar, a young, avant-garde, political scientist with whom we read
Thompson, Elias and Bourdieu, and Alberto Florez-Malagon, who taught us
trandisciplinarity, complexity and critical theory, the Sokal affair, post-
coloniality and the debates concerning science and technology. Today, I
wonder how all of these people could mesh together in the programme coming
from so many different backgrounds and experiences. Some of them seemed to
have emerged more from the tradition of pensamiento latinoamericano while
others appeared more comfortable within the Cultural Studies label. There
was no course on Birmingham or Stuart Hall, although we certainly read texts
that had emerged from the CCCS in our courses. Some professors were
philosophers, historians or political scientists, while others, such as Victor,
came from Visual and Cultural Studies. All the classes and discussions were
very heterogeneous, even contradictory and somewhat loose. Chloe Rutter, a
North American professor who had finished her PhD on Literature at the
University of California at San Diego taught Fronteras Raciales y Sexuales (Racial
and Sexual Frontiers) in the second semester. I read Butler in her class for the
first time, together with urban lesbian and gay novels. Jesus Martn-Barbero
taught another joint-course on new technologies that was shared with the
masters degree in communication studies. And Eduardo Restrepo who had

just finished his taught courses in the PhD programme in anthropology at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the guidance of Arturo
Escobar, Walter Mignolo and Lawrence Grossberg taught a course on social
movements.
As I like to tell my graduate students today, a certain schizophrenia
characterized the end of every semester: there was no settled answer to the
simple question of what Cultural Studies is about? We certainly recognized the
differences between the established Social Sciences. But it was much harder to
define the kind of intellectual project in which we were involved. There were
vivid discussions between faculty members that were echoed within the
different cohorts of students. As is characteristic of almost all academic
programmes, camps formed around different professors whose intellectual
backgrounds soon became clear. Some students who began with me quit
during the first semester, while others remained, continuing to participate
actively in intense debates during the next semesters. Sometimes we were
antagonists, at other times adversaries, but in the end we continued our
debates with beer in the bar next to the university. One fellow student told me
that it was just too much for her at her age to accept the incessant critical
attitude that Cultural Studies applied to everything that was near and dear to
her. Over the years, some left academic life while others have continued their
studies in various graduate programmes and have constructed brilliant
academic careers in a variety of Colombian universities. In the end we
finished our degrees, some taking more time than others. I finished with a
thesis describing the power effects of the human rights and humanitarian
apparatus established since the mid-1990s to protect the internally displaced
population in Colombia (Aparicio 2005).
I graduated some years later in 2004, and left for the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue my PhD in anthropology. The Javeriana
specialization finally turned into a Masters degree. Eduardo Restrepo replaced
Castro-Gomez as the head of the programme. He would give courses on Stuart
Hall and taught an Introduction to Cultural Studies pushing the intellectual
direction of the programme towards the core of both Halls and Grossbergs
concepts, focusing on problems such as radical contextualism, materialism,

articulation, relationality and anti-essentialism. For a couple of years, they
employees of the Instituto Pensar were the only two professors with stable
employment. The Masters degree had no fixed home and floated within the
Faculty of Social Sciences, with no department to provide back-up and without
stable teaching staff or research agendas. For most of the time, the other
faculty members (including myself some years later) would be hired just to
give one course under very flexible and loose hiring conditions. This meant
that in any given semester only one or two of the teaching staff would have any
job security. The rest of the slots were filled with young adjunct professors
who were returning to the country after studying for their PhDs. At the same
time, Rutter and two British colleagues Gregory Lobo, who had also finished
his PhD in Literature at the University of California at San Diego, and Nick
Morgan who was to leave in 2007 to go to Newcastle University arrived at the
Universidad de Los Andes to strengthen the undergraduate modern languages
programme, recently transformed into the Department of Languages and
Sociocultural Studies and which, for several years now, has been the only full-
blown department with stable faculty offering an undergraduate focus on
Cultural Studies, an emphasis more recently expanded since the first semester
of 2008 to include a Masters degree in Cultural Studies. I was to join the
department in August 2008.
Balancing acts, auditing cultures and new directions

The Universidad Nacional would also open its Masters programme in Cultural
Studies during these years, with faculty drawn from different departments
including anthropology, arts and sociology. Other programmes such as the
Maestra en Investigacion en Problemas Sociales Contemporaneos (Masters Research
Program in Contemporary Social Problems) at the Universidad Central in Bogota
was also host to many discussions, as well as to professors who migrated
between the nascent programmes. Other programmes such as the course at the
Universidad del Rosario on Gestion Cultural (Cultural Administration) have also
started. An old undergraduate classmate now heading the anthropology
department at the Universidad ICESI in Cali, invited a group of colleagues from
Bogota to discuss the intersections of Cultural Studies with anthropology. At
the University of Popayan in Cauca a PhD in Social Sciences has been
established, which is closely linked to these debates. The VII Hemispheric
Event on Performance and Politics was hosted by the Universidad Nacional
during 2009. The title of the event was Ciudadanas en escena, Performance y
Derechos Culturales en Colombia (Citizenships under the Spotlight: Performance
and Cultural Rights in Colombia), bringing together different kinds of
academics with varying degrees of investment with the events title, such as the
Chilean Nelly Richard and the New York based Diane Taylor, the performer
Guillermo Gomez Pena, Jesus Martn-Barbero, and numerous artists, cultural
producers and a group of graduate students from New York University.
In a period of less than 10 years, five graduate programmes in Cultural
Studies and other closely related courses have been created (at the Universidad
Javeriana, the Universidad Nacional, the Universidad de Los Andes, the Universidad
Distrital and Universidad del Rosario); one department of Languages and
Sociocultural Studies (Universidad de Los Andes); several national and
international conferences have been organized along with biannual student
colloquia at the Universidad Javeriana, the CES conferences on Cultural and
Literary Studies, and the Hemispheric event; faculty and graduate students
have published articles and books in Colombia and abroad; and networks and
exchange programmes with US and South American Cultural Studies
programmes have flourished. The graduate programmes at the Javeriana and
Universidad de Los Andes are currently part of the Latin American Network of
Graduate Programs in Cultural Studies. But at the same time, these
developments have revealed the highly centralized academic dimension that
this conversation has had in the country: almost all these initiatives have been
located in the larger public and private universities of Bogota.
This provisional and risky cartography has mentioned some of the crucial
landmarks that have characterized the Cultural Studies conversation in the
academic spaces that have used the label. Its emergence has clearly coincided
with the rapid transformation of higher education that has created new
demands for faculty with PhDs, established networks with overseas
universities and research centres, and challenged the classical academic
ethos with new demands that come from an audit culture now focusing on
outcomes, indexed articles, internal rankings and so on. This demand, which
has been felt more directly in the private universities, with a slower (but no
less driven) development in the public universities, has changed the whole
atmosphere of higher education in less than 10 years. The increasing needs
or desires of a changing economy have generated pressure for a more
qualified labour force and compelled universities to offer new programmes
at graduate level. The Cultural Studies conversation has arrived in the
country with what Evelina Dagnino calls when describing the connection
between the arrival of neoliberalism and the rise of multiculturalism in South
America a perverse confluence. With fewer opportunities to fund students
in these programmes in Colombia, a sizeable portion of the younger
generations has emigrated to the US and Europe but also much more
recently to Argentina and Brazil. However, for many different reasons, other
students prefer to stay in Colombia and enter the programmes described
here: perhaps because of their lack of English, difficulty in obtaining loans,
economic burdens, the high reputation of Colombian universities, the

perceived exhaustion of the disciplinary focuses of the traditional disciplines
and, finally, the fact that the Cultural Studies programmes themselves their
faculty, research agendas, graduate courses and institutional support are
perceived to be good.
I use the quotes because one does indeed wonder how to evaluate the
academic institutionalization of Cultural Studies in Colombia. The growing and
established departments and graduate programmes in Cultural Studies amount
to no more than two or three initiatives. But the landscape is a surprising one
given that just a few years ago no programmes, research agendas or faculty staff
in the country would have used the label to describe their academic
endeavours. And there is more. With an estimated population of almost 45

million, a poverty rate of 45,5%, extreme poverty of 16,4% and a Gini
coeficient of 0.578 according to the latest figures of the National Statistical
Institute (DANE 2010), one wonders why there should be a continuing growth
in applications to Cultural Studies programmes. Indeed, Marx (1990) told us
long ago about the existence of the available industrial reserve army, always
ready to be exploited by capital. In Colombia, certainly, one strategy of the
more privileged ranks of this large reserve army, drawn both from public and
private universities, involves increasing professionalization to maintain the
hope of landing one of a shrinking proportion of well (decently) paid and stable
jobs. Across the disciplines, and especially in the hard sciences, the growing
number of applicants every year, even for the private universities, is notorious.
As I have said, for Cultural Studies programmes, although the numbers of
applicants are certainly minimal compared to graduate programmes in the hard
sciences, the increase in the numbers of applicants is surprising, especially
when you turn up, bearing these statistics in mind, to teach a class between
5:00 and 8:00 pm, to exhausted yet enthusiastic students who have worked all
day to pay their bills.
Conclusion
As I was discussing this article with two colleagues who had participated in
events organized by the CES in 1998 and then by the Instituto Pensar at the
Javeriana, we concluded that Colombia has a unique history even in Latin
America because of the growing scope of graduate and undergraduate
programmes, publications and research agendas currently using the Cultural
Studies label. As my colleagues said, the adoption of the label is peculiarly
significant given that in other conversations in Latin America it has been openly
rejected. Thus, from the trends of the Southern Cones Culture Critique
conversation (Richard 2002) to Matos (2002) call for Studies and Other Practices
in Culture and Power, there have been persistent trends in critical thinking and
action that have refused the Cultural Studies label at all in Latin America. They
consciously reject its use because of the way in which it has become highly
academicized and depoliticized in the US. However, they have employed
certain trends (such as that exemplified by the CCCS at Birmingham) as critical
sources for establishing horizontal dialogues with other conversations and
intellectual practices in Latin America. Furthermore, as Richard (2002) argues,
these traditions from abroad which include the work of Foucault, Derrida,
Deleuze and others have become strategic influences for rethinking academic
disciplines and for opening up new research problems and methodologies. It
must not be forgotten, though, that they arrived in a country where they
encountered already established critiques of the social sciences and humanities
that had been developed at least since the 1950s.

I outlined some of these previous intellectual traditions already present in
Colombia and that had established a critique of social sciences when I analyzed
Latin American formations and contexts. Other traditions I have not
mentioned, but that have certainly nurtured these debates in Colombia
include the works of Mariategui (1973) on the indigenous problem in Peru and
of Fernando Ortiz (1963) and Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (1969) on internal
colonialism and cultural, economic, social and political hierarchies and
dependencies. Indeed, in many ways, Ortizs (1963) central concept of
transculturation preceded Garca Canclinis (1989) Hybrid Cultures, offering both
a fruitful approach to understanding and analyzing the concrete articulations
and strategies involved in entering and exiting modernity. The central work of
Rama (1984) on the Lettered City also highlighted these inequalities from a
cultural perspective, informing the structuration of new and old lines of
domination and inequality. From Argentina, the works of Laclau (1986) and
others who emerged from departments of communication studies (Grimson
and Varela 2002), confronted populism and the media with key concepts such
as articulation and hegemony, which were later incorporated into the heart of
Halls theoretical armatures (Daryl Slack 1996). Also, Escobar et al.s book
(2001) on social movements, which employed the insights of Raymond
Williams and Hall precisely to highlight that struggles over meanings constitute
a key site of tension between social movements and the state, has become a
decisive tour de force helping us understand why, finally, culture matters and
how it has turned into a decisive arena of struggle.
Certainly, as Mato (2002) argues, these academic and intellectual
traditions along with many others that I do not have enough space to
describe exist simultaneously in Colombia with other intellectual practices of
knowledge and power. These other sites of knowledge production have
included social movements, cultural producers, NGOs and, to a much lesser
extent, national governmental and municipal institutions. These dialogues have
given the conversation in Colombia a crucial interventionist drive that, while
not always winning positions, has nevertheless positioned these sites as key
actors in a long-lasting war of manoeuvre. Explicit policies, budget allocations,
legal decisions or even artistic interventions in the public sphere are some of
the ways and forms in which the Cultural Studies label or its alternative
genealogies in Latin America have migrated from the academic site in order
(hopefully) to alter, transform and disrupt hegemonies and their visceral,
material effects.
Indeed, the brutal effects of neoliberal policies and the long-lasting
coloniality of power seem to sediment and extend themselves to all areas of
social life in the country including the larger public and private universities
where the Cultural Studies programmes are currently located. To a great
extent, the confluence of the different traditions of critical thinking and action
that currently exist within the departments and programmes in Cultural
Studies in Colombia have approached and analyzed these formations. The

immense and incomplete task is to forge even more radical alliances with other
actors to foster and nurture more enduring and sustainable transformations.
Here is where the radical evaluation of the Cultural Studies label or of the
associated conversations should occur. Thus, notwithstanding the perverse
confluences in which these debates and programmes have matured and been
institutionalized in the country, the Cultural Studies label and/or conversation
in Colombia does offer sufficient sources of local critical thinking and action
with which to fight the battle and construct alliances. Against new and old
hegemonies that today send critical thinkers to jail, disappear students, and
close spaces for critical thinking in the country; given the challenges ahead, we
cannot afford the banalization of Cultural Studies in Colombia. Perhaps we will
be obliged to enter this debate in years to come. Or perhaps not.
Notes
1 Although I am using this label, I also want to be cautious about the
homogenized effect it can bring to describe what were different and
heterogeneous understandings of the intellectual and political work that the
centre simultaneously encompassed (see Grossberg 1997).
2 Larry Grossberg and Toby Miller (Packer 2003) have also underscored this
peculiarity for the British and Australian Cultural Studies where the State,
cultural industries, cultural policies and so on have become crucial problems
and research objects vis-a-vis North American Cultural studies where they
believe these interrogations have not been so central. But noteworthy, there
were also differences in those approaches that related to the way Foucault
and/or Gramsci were introduced in these traditions in relation to previous
frameworks. For Colombia, see Ochoa (2003).
3 For a further discussion on these cross-dialogues, see Rodrguez (2000).
4 A recent number of Cultural Studies introduced this conversation in a very
clear and systematic way.
Notes on contributor
Juan Ricardo Aparicio is an Assistant Professor at the Department of
Languages and Sociocultural Studies, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota,
Colombia. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill on 2010. His dissertation explored the circulation and
actualization of the human rights and humanitarian regimes along a network
that linked international organizations with grass-root communities in
Colombia. His current research areas are violence, transitional or post-conflict
scenarios, displacement, geopolitics of knowledge and the state.
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Juan Ricardo Aparicio

CULTURAL STUDIES IN COLOMBIA

This article presents an always risky cartography of the institutionalization of the

Keywords academic disciplines; conjunctures; Estudios Culturales;

paradoxical enunciation: the absence of any definition becomes key to

The notorious postmodern debate in Colombia

Old and new articulations: the committed intellectual

country. Spearheaded in the main by individual faculty and independent

common to find academics working in non-academic locations, including

most important role was played by Santiago Castro-Gomez, by that time a

conferences on the genealogies and founding conversations of Latin American

and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.4

Unlearning and re-learning Cultural Studies

graduate programme in Cultural Studies (Humar 2009), thus establishing a

Especializacion en estudios culturales. Although I do not remember the exact visual

masters degree in communication studies. And Eduardo Restrepo who had

concepts, focusing on problems such as radical contextualism, materialism,

Balancing acts, auditing cultures and new directions

economic burdens, the high reputation of Colombian universities, the

endeavours. And there is more. With an estimated population of almost 45

that had been developed at least since the 1950s.

Studies in Colombia have approached and analyzed these formations. The

Castro-Gomez, S. & Guardiola-Rivera, O. (2000) Introduccion [Introduction],

Postcolonial Debate, eds. M. Morana, E. Dussel & C. A. Jauregui, Durham,

Freire, P. (1998) Posthumous letter to the Congress, in Peoples Participation:

studies and culture in Argentina], in Estudios y otras practicas intelectuales

Martn-Barbero, J. (1987) De los medios a las mediaciones. Comunicacion, cultura y

Sociales, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Restrepo, G. & Jaramillo, J. E. (1998) Exordio a modo de planisferio sobre

D. Mato, comp., Caracas, CLACSO, pp. 363 372.

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