“Esa paz blanca, esa paz de muerte”: Peacetime, wartime, and black impossible chronos in the Colombian postconflict

Abstract

On August 24, 2016, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced the formal end of the fifty-year-long war with the Colombian Revolucionary Army Force (FARC). Since then, almost six hundred human rights activists have been killed, homicidal violence against youth in major Colombian cities has remained high, and the prospect of positive peace in black territories is at best elusive. Within this context, the article examines two questions: how to understand the transitional moment to peace when peacetime and wartime are experienced as atemporal events according to the racial alterity of the subject? Can the normative framework of conflict/postconflict account for the trans-historicity of the black experience in societies of the African diaspora?.