Exile and Diasporic Memory Activism in Colombian Women’s Writing

Abstract

This article explores how, in the context of the country’s most recent peace process, Colombian women memory activists have challenged the erasure of Colombian exile from both narratives of Colombian political violence and the wider scholarship on Latin American exile. Focusing on creative forms of memory activism deployed by the writer, Fabiola Calvo Ocampo, and the collective Mujer Diáspora, the article analyses how their individual and collective literary-testimonies contest the negation of their victimhood in Colombia and intervene in disputes over the meaning of exile in the Colombian context. Yet, while making visible the trauma of exile, the article shows how these creative texts also seek to move beyond dominant theoretical representations of the woman exile as being liberated from the nation, or nostalgically yearning for it, to instead configure her as an activist subject.