Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. Drawing upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of violence studies known as violentología, which examines the transformation of Colombian society during a century of political and interpersonal violence, this book adapts the neologism "violentology" as a heuristic device and epistemic category to map the salience of violence in Latina/o history, life, and culture in the U.S. and globally.
Based on one hundred primary texts and archival documents from an expansive range of Latina/o communities - Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, Salvadoran American, Guatemalan American, and various mixed-heritages and transversal hybridities throughout the world - Violentologies features multiple generations of Latinx combatants, wartime non-combatants, and "peacetime" civilians whose identities and ideologies extend through, and also far beyond, familiar Latinidades. Based on this discrepant archive, Violentologies articulates a contrapuntal assessment of the inchoate, contradictory, and complex range of violence-based Latina/o ontologies and epistemologies, and corresponding negotiations of power, or ideologies, pursuant to an expansive and meta-critical Pan-Latina/o methodology and, ultimately, an anti-identitarian Post-Latina/o paradigm.
Violentologies explores how different forms of violence shape identity and political vision in both familiar and unexpected ways using Latina/o writers and performers as case-studies.
Violentologies teaches readers to perceive differently the horrors, hurts, and sufferings of war; to diagnose and treat the sociality-of-violence that imbues our lives; and to allow glimpses of the social physics of peace. Olguín encourages and inspires us to engage in a form of auto-criticality that is derived from Anzaldúan, Freirean, and Fanonian insistences on critical thinking/doing/being. At every level, Violentologies is an original and landmark theoretical and methodological intervention that takes up, and goes beyond, previous contributions to revolutionary thinking. Arrayed here are original theories and methods that will advance any academic discipline committed to the study and deployment of liberation.
