In 2022 Colombians elected the first leftist government and first Afro-Colombian vice-president in the country's history, Francia Elena Márquez, a prominent peace activist and defender of ethnic and territorial rights. In Raising Two Fists, Roosbelinda Cárdenas offers a timely analysis of the political struggles that help us understand Márquez's trajectory (an important figure in the book) and the political imaginaries advanced by Black activists and organisations in a context of multicultural state policies and widespread violence. In Colombia, the expansion of multicultural rights in the 1990s coincided with the intensification of the armed conflict. As a result of significant Black mobilisation, in 1993 the state passed the Law of Black Communities (Law 70) which recognised Black people as an ethnic group with specific rights and recognised the collective territorial rights of some riverine rural communities in the Pacific region. Yet, Law 70 was quickly followed by a violent counter-agrarian reform that resulted in widespread human rights violations, including the forced displacement of thousands of Black people.
This book contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring the limitations and contradictions of the multicultural conjuncture in Colombia and Latin America at large. It demonstrates that the violent context in which Black struggles have unfolded in Colombia since the 1990s interrupted and transformed the political agendas of Black communities, including demands for Black territoriality. Black activists have had to organise to implement and expand ethnic rights, challenge racism and defend Black life. While Cárdenas highlights the limitations of multiculturalism, she goes beyond it, convincingly arguing that Black activists have also used multiculturalism in ‘creative and counterintuitive ways’ to advance other political projects (p. 9). She contends that Black activists have articulated ‘a capacious vision’ of what she calls ‘Black Citizenship’ (p. 7) that involves a dual – or two-fisted – strategy for citizenship rights ‘as members of the nation-state’, and as ‘a diasporic black nation’ (p. 5). At its core Black Citizenship is a strategy to challenge persistent economic and racial inequalities and ‘historical structures of violence’ (p. 30).
Raising Two Fists draws from years of extensive ethnographic research with Black communities largely in the southern Pacific region and with major national Black organisations in Bogotá, including the PCN and the AFRODES, which have active international lobbying campaigns. The book is not an ethnography of social movements or specific activists per se. Instead, the author proposes a ‘back-and-forth approach between biography and ethnography’ to illuminate specific forms of Black mobilisation and question the distinction ‘between activists and “ordinary” people’ (pp. 22–3).
The book consists of an introduction, an epilogue and four chapters that examine different dimensions of Black mobilisation at the intersections of multiculturalism and the war, primarily from the 1990s to 2022. Chapter 1 examines the process of collective titling and dissemination of Law 70 in the region of the lower Mira River, near the Ecuador border, where Black peasants faced threats to the mangroves that supported their livelihoods. Law 70 resonated with these communities because it spoke to their understandings of place and experiences as marginalised citizens. Chapter 2 examines the work of AFRODES at home and abroad and the extent to which the mass uprooting of Black people from their lands and territories produced ‘new subjectivities and political projects’ (pp. 92–3) beyond demands for cultural and territorial rights. By the mid-2000s Colombia had one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world and rural Black people were disproportionately impacted by forced displacement. The experiences of dislocation, widespread racism in urban centres and activism in international arenas led activists of AFRODES to demand differential reparations for the war that recognised their rights to cultural difference and the realities of racism. In Chapter 3 Cárdenas explores the perils and promises of mobilising around what she terms ‘victimized citizenship’. While making claims as victims of the war has been an effective strategy, it also risks overshadowing more structural demands. Yet, the convergence between victimisation and multiculturalism produced an unexpected opening for Black activists to organise for historical reparations. Chapter 4 argues that Black activists have put forth an expansive vision of peace that goes beyond the cessation of the armed conflict, but that is ‘anti-genocide’ (p. 201). For activists like Márquez who have pursued a dual strategy of Black Citizenship, making claims to national inclusion while cultivating diasporic links, the point of peace-making ‘is to transform the politics of death into the politics of life’ (p. 201).
The book makes important contributions to the scholarship on Black social movements in Colombia. Rather than reading the post-Law 70 context through a lens of failure due to the built-in limitations of multiculturalism and the brutality of the war, Cárdenas offers us a richer picture that centres Black political imagination and innovation. Moreover, while much of the research on Black mobilisation since the 1990s has focused on rural settings, Cárdenas reveals complex links between rural and urban contexts. She also draws attention to the various scales in which Black politics operate, from community councils in the Pacific, to the halls of congress in Bogotá, to lobbying the US Congress and addressing the United Nations.
That said, Raising Two Fists reproduces a dominant trend in the scholarship of the multicultural turn in Colombia that approaches the Pacific region as a stand-in for Black mobilisation. The book presents the strategies of Black Citizenship as national in scope even though the case studies and activists discussed are largely from the Pacific. The book would have been enriched by attending to the differences of political struggles in other parts of the country such as the Caribbean or addressing the outsized role the Pacific has played in the development of movements for Black Citizenship. Moreover, while the argument about diasporic belonging is compelling, the author could have developed it further by engaging with historical and literary works that show there is a long and rich tradition of Black activists and intellectuals cultivating Black diasporic networks to make claims at home. For instance, in 1977 Manuel Zapata Olivella, Colombia's foremost thinker of race and nation, organised the first Pan-Africanist congress in Latin America, where participants denounced racism and demanded historical reparations.
Raising Two Fists is an important contribution to the scholarship on multicultural politics, Black social movements in Latin America and the armed conflict in Colombia. It will appeal to a broader audience interested in histories of social movements, racial formations and questions of war and peace.
