Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands

The Pacific region had yet to be overrun by drug traffickers, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces in the early 1990s. It was better known as the largest area of black culture in the country (90 percent of the region’s population is Afro-Colombian) and as a supplier of natural resources, including timber, gold, platinum, and silver. Colombia’s Law 70, passed in 1993, promised ethnic and cultural rights, collective land ownership, and socioeconomic development to Afro-Colombian communities. At the same time that various constituencies sought to interpret and implement Law 70, the state was moving ahead with large-scale development initiatives intended to modernize the economically backward coastal lowlands. Meanwhile national and international conservation organizations were attempting to protect the region’s rich biodiversity. Asher explores this juxtaposition of black rights, economic development, and conservation—and the tensions it catalyzed. She analyzes the meanings attached to “culture,” “nature,” and “development” by the Colombian state and Afro-Colombian social movements, including women’s groups. In so doing, she shows that the appropriation of development and conservation discourses by the social movements had a paradoxical effect. It legitimized the presence of state, development, and conservation agencies in the Pacific region even as it influenced those agencies’ visions and plans.

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• Turf Wars: Territory and Citizenship in the Contemporary State
• Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture)
• Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
• On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis
• Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
• Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities
• Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil