Epilogue

Summary

The epilogue begins by offering a brief overview of the main arguments of the book before meditating on what Barragan (following Saidiya Hartman’s formulation) refers to as the “afterlife of gradual emancipation rule” in the Colombian Pacific. As she argues, the very essence of gradual emancipation rule—that is, the notion of gradated, scheduled “progress” amidst an ongoing state of racial terror—remains alive in today’s Colombian Black Pacific. This paradoxical state of progress and terror, Barragan shows, is nowhere more evident than in the current state of Chocó and the Pacific lowlands, the most marginalized and impoverished region in Colombia, with record levels of displacement and violence against civilians. She moves from the nineteenth century to the late 1990s, when the Colombian Pacific became the central site of powerful Afro-Colombian social movement mobilizations and ground zero of Colombia’s ever-shifting civil war.