The banality of displacement: Discourse and thoughtlessness in the internal refugee crisis in Colombia
Section snippets
Introduction: images of destruction, displacement and despair
In March 2006, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver organized a photo exhibition by Colombian photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado entitled Memory, Place, and Displacement. The images chosen were the product of Abad's photographic journey over the previous decade to document the suffering of the exiled in Colombia. The visitor to the exhibition comes quite literally face to face with this suffering. An elderly woman holds her grandson tight in her arms,
Arendt and the banality of evil
Over a period of more than twelve months in 1961 and 1962, the Jewish writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the proceedings against ex-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who was put on trial in Jerusalem under Israel's Nazis and Nazi Collaborator Punishment Law of 1950 for his role in the holocaust and the extermination of millions of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s. Arendt published her observations in a series of articles in The New Yorker between February and March 1963.
Other banalities
It is worthwhile pointing out that various critical geographers have recently referred to the notion of banality, often in relation to the “war on terror.” Arguing that colonial domination in the Middle East is anything but a thing of the past, Derek Gregory (2004, p. 16), for example, wants to shake us up in our complicity in the horrors of “the banality of the colonial present.” Employing a similar geopolitical perspective on Western intervention in the Middle East (and elsewhere), James
Banality and attitudinal thoughtlessness
The “strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” that Arendt (1977, p. 288) wanted to capture in the notion of banality is revealed in the Colombian context in three principal ways. First, there is the thoughtlessness of the individual committing an act of violence. We may consider the paramilitary fighter, for example, who hacks his victims to death with a machete, plays football with their heads, or rapes a campesino woman in front of her husband. For most of us, such degree of
Counting the displaced
There are two major bodies that produce statistics on internal forced displacement in Colombia today: the government agency Unit for Integrated Support and Reparation for Victims UARIV (Unidad para la Atención y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas) and the nongovernmental Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement CODHES.5 While the latter has operated since 1992, the former is the latest in a number of newly created governmental agencies charged with accounting for the phenomenon of forced
Why (better) numbers matter: contesting the colour-blind discourse of displacement
In 2004 I spent three months of fieldwork in Colombia to examine the ways in which the Afro-Colombian population had been affected by forced displacement. Previously – in the late 1990s – I had conducted research into the place-based mobilization strategies of the social movement of black communities over land claims in the Pacific coast region (Oslender, 2004, Oslender, 2016). The situation on the ground had shifted dramatically since then. Instead of securing their legally guaranteed
Breaking banality
In The Will to Knowledge: the History of Sexuality, Volume One, Michel Foucault (1998, p. 101) reflects on the potential for subverting dominant discourse: “We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.” In 2004, Colombia's Constitutional Court took on such a role of providing a “starting point for an
Conclusions
I began this article with reflections on an exhibition by photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado that depicts the suffering faces of violence and war in Colombia. Exhibitions such as these project an embodiment of violence that confronts the dominant displacement discourse. They are a radically opposed way of talking about displacement that puts the individual experience in the frame and on the map, countering the disembodied representations found in statistics and in the bureaucratic
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank various anonymous reviewers, James Sidaway, Rod Neumann, and Bernd Reiter for their close reading of the manuscript and their very helpful comments. I would also like to thank John Agnew for his encouragement to keep thinking critically about Hannah Arendt despite the occasional hiccup along the way. I have worked on the notion of “banality of displacement” for a number of years now. An early version of these ideas was published as a Spanish-language article in Colombia
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