Lizarazo, Tania. Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. 2024. 255 pages

Since the 2000s, the Chocó has seen an increase in political assassinations of activists, political leaders, and union leaders. The socio-political alienation that the region has experienced since colonial times made this violence possible. National discourses around the concept of mestizaje—an ideology based on the mixing of Euro-descendent, Afro-descendent, and Indigenous groups to create a mixed and homogeneous population—have been crucial in shaping a distinctive Colombian identity, both before and after independence. This process relegated Indigenous and Black communities to the margins of the country: the Caribbean, the Amazon, and the Pacific. While central highland cities like Bogotá and Medellín, with their mestizo population, concentrated social, economic, and political power, the racial imaginary excluded the Chocó, which straddles the northern Pacific and Caribbean coasts. In the Chocó, the project of blanqueamiento—the attempt to whiten its own society—facilitated decades of devastating natural resource extraction by foreign and national capital. Lizarazo helps construct a post-conflict future by centring narratives that are relegated to the geographical and discursive peripheries, demonstrating her own commitment to rehearsal and presence. Here, presence takes on a particular meaning that includes both showing up to enact utopian realities and fostering feminismo-en-lugar, a place-based feminist ethics of care. This ethics of care involves taking part in the events where utopias are rehearsed, strengthening community engagement, and building regional, national, and international networks of care and solidarity. A method of participatory digital storytelling helps address the inevitable power hierarchies present in research by involving the storytellers in the research process. This ensures their voices and stories are not lost in academic translation, allowing her collaborators to have a say in how their stories are presented to the world. This methodological choice results in a project that emphasizes community building, survival, solidarity, and the role of women in imagining a post-conflict world, rather than trauma. In doing so, Lizarazo highlights the commitment of her collaborators—Vamos Mujeres (Let’s Go Women), COCOMACIA (Consejo Comunitario Mayor de La Asociación Campesina Integral del Atrato), Comisionadas de Género (Gender Commissioners), and Women in Black—to ensuring that victims speak rather than being spoken about. In a context marked by ideological alienation, Postconflict Utopias highlights collaborative memory-making—creating archives owned by Black communities in the Pacific to reclaim the space denied them within national and hegemonic discourses. Thus, memories and archives have a key position in rehearsing change by providing stable ideological foundations for a post-conflict future. They become part of a place in the making. The book begins by discussing Vamos Mujeres, a group of Black women engaged in providing workshops in communities along the Atrato River, which flows from the Andes to the Caribbean. Through a detailed account of the group’s work to move beyond victimhood, Lizarazo explores how the materialization of a post-conflict future is possible through the embodied, performative actions of the women who take part in the workshops. She shows how presence is paramount to rehearsal in Chapter One. Amidst violence, participation in envisioning and rehearsing a future becomes a political act when survival and continuation are not guaranteed. Through transmitting embodied and tacit knowledge, the chapter shows how workshops serve as a communal commitment to rehearse a future. Digital storytelling is a valuable decolonial tool and a collaborative way to build trusting relationships with local communities as an outsider. Because of the participatory nature of the research process, Lizarazo’s collaboration with Comisionadas de Género—a group that advocates for women to take a more active role in rebuilding communities in Chocó—helped ease the effects of research fatigue she encountered at the beginning of her fieldwork. This …