Guest Talk Silke Oldenburg
Thinking with the Archipelago: Mangroves, marginalization and the making of alternative environmental futures in Cartagena, Colombia
22.04.2024
April 22, 2024, 18:15
Room L 155
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Oettingenstraße 67
80538 München
Dr. Silke Oldenburg (Geneva Graduate Institute):
Thinking with the Archipelago: Mangroves, marginalization and the making of alternative environmental futures in Cartagena, Colombia
«They fear that one day we will cross the bridge, and a wave of slums will flood the city », states Máximo, one of the protagonists of the novel “Chambacú”. Written by famous Afrocolombian anthropologist and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella (1962), this exclamation sums up emotions, experiences and everyday life but also possible futures of Cartagena’s marginalized Afrodescendent community in the middle of the 20th century. Built over a landfill along the mangrove swamps just outside of Cartagena’s historic city center, the settlement of Chambacú was finally razed in 1971 enhancing Cartagena’s urban transformation towards a global port-, tourist-, and world-heritage city at the Colombian Caribbean coast and dislocating its inhabitants to the urban margins.
In today’s urban imaginary, Chambacú is a vivid memory of the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade, neoliberal urban beautification projects and the loss of urban biodiversity. Chambacú has been a recurring and significant point of reference during my 13months of ethnographic research in Cartagena (2015-ongoing), having been turned into a discursive weapon and memorial by my research partners.
My talk offers reflections on racial politics, climate coloniality and infrastructural projects in Olaya Herrera, a vast neighborhood on Cartagena’s periphery. Largely inhabited by Afrodescendent population, Olaya is a rapidly changing social setting, where entanglements of race, ecology, citizenship and socio-spatial inequalities impact not only Olaya’s inhabitants’ everyday life but also their environmental futures. In particular, the mangrove forest (el manglar) is centre stage for political and technocratic discourses on the one hand but also highlights people’s experience and narratives about distrust, displacement and political exclusion on the other. Focusing on ordinary citizens’ narratives aims to demonstrate the plural ways of knowledge creation in order to de-colonize urban climate change discourses.
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