Afterlives of Property: Non/Status and Dispossession of Black Communities in Cartagena, Colombia

• In Event: Interdiction, Terror, and Resistance: On The Structural Positionality of Blackness in the Americas

Abstract

“Hemos sido abandonados,” or “we have been abandoned,” is a common refrain of Afro-Cartagenero youth to describe the structural position of vulnerability and death of Black communities in Cartagena, Colombia. The refrain can be seen as a metaphor for the critical juxtaposition of the commodification of blackness that sustains the historic center’s wealth of tourism, and the devastating material conditions of Black life beyond the center’s colonial walls. The phrase also interrogates how multinational and state-sponsored tourism and development projects are made possible by the assassination of Black residents and the criminalization of Black communities as “invaders occupying empty lots.” Despite the justice formally offered through the partial adaptation of Law 70 in the Caribbean city, territorial rights of Black communities are routinely violated. To examine how development is constitutive of Black death and dispossession here, is to analyze a historic relation––the city’s history as a major slave port in the country, and the afterlife of slavery’s property relations.

Based on ethnographic research, this paper centers how at once blackness is commodified for cultural patrimony, while Black life is inscribed upon with the terror of invasion and non-development. I argue that the simultaneous commodification and dispossession of Black life is the logic on which the development and future life of the city depends. Furthermore, I offer an analysis of how Black activist youth are pushing beyond the framework of rights and inclusion to bring these racialized logics of development in Cartagena into crisis.

Author

• Jameelah Morris, Stanford University