What follows is a moving document, a no-holds-barred confession by a composer who writes music even if it puts him at a considerable disadvantage compared to some of his colleagues of the international avant-garde.

In preparing the German edition of my Three Questions book, I invited Detlev Glanert to contribute to the project and asked for a selection of recordings. I was impressed by his music and described it in my introduction in my own subjective manner, relying on the associations it had evoked. Natural images emerged in my mind, trees, clouds, birds, and the wind.

Glanert asked me to delete those references, for he feared they would reinforce the misconceptions his aesthetic sometimes evoked, that might cause his music to be falsely seen as program music. I complied and rewrote the entire introduction.

Detlev Glanert would be the ideal composer to interview about courage and the tyranny of taste, I thought, and his contribution has confirmed my assumption. Taste and prejudice can obviously still exercise a tyranny of their own and a composer like Glanert needs courage—obsession—to go on composing the way he is convinced is his own.

February 2016

In view of what is happening in the world today, it appears frivolous to describe aesthetic decisions by composers with the word courage. Rather, it takes obstinacy to overcome resistance, to face controversy, and to embark on a path that may turn out to be lonesome. Also, to ignore opposition and detractors.

Most composers—indeed, most people in general—are not particularly courageous and are beset by all kinds of anxieties, especially about pain, failure, humiliation. Courage (obstinacy) means perhaps to go on composing regardless of such uninviting prospects.

Naturally, one works in the face of expectations and prejudices. Nowadays, you need as much—or as little—courage to set up taboos as you did in the past to break them. What really is remarkable, to my mind, is that one should stick to one's way nevertheless: that is, create new music that will only appeal to a very small group of people; music that requires a great deal of effort and expense to be performed and will in most cases not make enough money for the composer to live on.

Scholars of medieval England have rarely discussed language socialization as part of the immigrant experience, focusing instead on the political and economic tensions created between natives and foreign migrants to England. When discussed at all, language socialization has been treated in the context of languagelearning strategies, especially in terms of how the English learned French and Latin, rather than how French-language speakers coped in England. This essay adopts a slightly different approach to understanding language socialization and the survival of spoken French in later medieval England by contextualizing the integration of native French-speakers into English society, particularly in the south-western county of Devon. It attempts to overcome the paucity of direct evidence about French-speaking migrants, most of whom were of low status and probably illiterate, by drawing on the records of taxes imposed on alien residents of medieval England in the mid-fifteenth century, supplemented by additional prosopographical information.

The starting point for this analysis is the so-called ‘alien subsidy’ of 1440, a tax assessed on foreign or ‘alien’ residents of medieval England, whose records have now been made available online in a searchable database by the England's Immigrants project. The taxpayers recorded in the returns of 1440 and later alien subsidies (the last one was approved in 1487), along with the aliens singled out in the first Tudor subsidy of 1523, account for the bulk of the project's almost 65,000 names of foreign-born residents in England from 1330 to 1550. These taxes on first-generation foreigners were the culmination of anti-alien sentiment that had been mounting in England for some time, evident in a series of restrictive measures aimed initially at foreign merchants and clergy. Because the coverage of the alien subsidies declined over time as local assessors grew lax and particular foreign groups (such as the Irish, Bretons, Channel Islanders, Spanish and French living under English rule in Normandy and Gascony) became exempt, the 1440 tax offers the best picture of England's foreign population at one moment in time. Its listings separate householders (heads of households taxed at 16d each) from non-householders such as servants and general laborers (taxed at 6d), although the default rates were enormous, especially among non-householders.

Among the many subjects Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has touched in her career thus far, the French of England has been molded by her most of all. In her honor, this chapter explores the implications of one manuscript of Le Comput by Philippe de Thaon for our understanding of where the French of England came from, how it was first received and what it had to do with earlier written English. An incredible six whole or partial copies of Le Comput survive from the twelfth century, more than any other text except the various French-language versions of the Psalter. It would be rash to call Le Comput the most popular original French-language work of the twelfth century, but certainly it epitomized, along with the French Psalter, the kind of text that scribes frequently committed to parchment and later readers preserved. As such it possesses a remarkable but largely unexplored importance in the history of written French.

Cambridge, University Library, MS Additional 4166, Fragment 9, is our earliest witness to Philippe's text and contains a fragmentary copy of Le Comput, glossed in Latin. Long considered to be from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, the manuscript was reassigned to the first half of the twelfth century by Maria Careri, Christine Ruby and Ian Short in their Livres et écritures en français et en occitan au XIIe siècle: catalogue illustré. That revision makes the Cambridge fragment one of only seven surviving French-language manuscripts produced in England before the middle of the twelfth century and a unique example of an extensive Latin gloss on a French-language manuscript before 1200.

The Cambridge fragment's peculiar layout, where Latin glosses French and not the other way around, invites us to rethink the relationship between different languages in Philippe's writing and to broaden our critical conceptions of the meaning of the romance vernacular in the first half of the twelfth century. Frameworks that explain language choice by means of the prestige or inherent authority of one language vis-à-vis another cannot explain the form of the Cambridge fragment or the content and style of Le Comput as a whole.

I do not hesitate to contact critics who have commented on my books in one way or another. Those who praised them, receive a short letter of thanks from me; those who took issue with some of their aspects, will receive a note in which I attempt to explain why I did what I did.

Rainer Nonnenmann was not all that happy with my book Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers, and true to form, I contacted him. Later, when the idea for the present book struck me, I wrote and asked him what he thought of it.

He had many reservations, as you will see in his essay. I went on with the project nevertheless and am now rather curious to see what he will have to say about it.

In any case, having gotten this far in the book, you will learn from Nonnenmann, why it was not a good idea to do it in the first place.

Rainer Nonnenmann: The Anxiety of Composers and the Plurality of Tastes

Born in Ludwigsburg, Rainer Nonnenmann is a German musicologist, music journalist, and university professor. He is editor of the journal MusikTexte and author of a number of books on the music and aesthetic of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Cologne, August 2015

Dear Mr. Varga,

We have exchanged some e-mails about your latest book, Drei Fragen an 73 Komponisten (Regensburg, 2014) as well as your current project, with which I wish you every success. You have now invited me to contribute a text and asked me expressly to formulate my critical remarks and doubts. I have followed suit. My reservations will probably be invalidated by the views of some of the composers—I certainly hope so! For I have taken your wording “the courage of composers” seriously and have only considered composers in general, mentioning certain artists as an exception. Without meaning to, I may well have lumped them all together, even though a thorough look at each case by itself might have brought to light individual differences.

Among the nearly 1,000 items in French that survive from medieval England's four hundred years of francophone culture, as listed in Dean and Boulton's indispensable Anglo-Norman Literature, are numerous manuscripts commissioned by aristocratic English women for whom French had become a language of culture and learning. Such women, some of whom may well have controlled budgets of their own, benefitted from the increasing wealth of the English aristocracy and the availability of a shared, privileged vernacular language. They bore responsibility for the moral and religious education of their children and of other family and household members, and they had the means to commission devotional and biblical material. Often, such women could personalize their religious reading by participating in the decision process, consulting with their clerics, scribes and illustrators about a book's contents, order of selections and the kinds and numbers of illustrations, perhaps with the intention of making them suitable for the instruction of a range of adults and children. As the patrons of frequently luxurious and expensively produced books, women helped to advance the well-documented ‘laicization’ of religious literature in medieval England, in large part the result of an environment notable for the very close and porous links between the high-ranking laity and the clergy (so much so that, as Sara Lipton observes studying the Bible moralisee, divisions between lay and clerical become ‘inadequate categories of investigation’). Modern scholars, prominent among them Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, have done a great deal to locate, describe and interpret English women's intellectual contributions, especially to manuscript culture. That work, along with Wogan-Browne's extensive investigations into England's long French-language moment, have altered our conceptual map of medieval England's literary practices.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries especially, the Church wished to strengthen and define itself anew and to reach out more broadly to laypeople (as codified, for example, in various canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215). In the same period, enmity toward the Jews also increased, reaching a zenith (but not an end) in the 1290 Expulsion. Why this was so, and why the period beginning in the twelfth century in particular provided the soil upon which anti-Jewish feeling grew, has been the subject of numerous studies.

The house-officer, an extremely kind and good-tempered man, had been commissioned by the Count to take me to my assigned apartment, which was a single chamber, but very large and bright. The table-setter had the commission to provide the proper care for my apartment, and to provide me the necessary service, for which I gave me monthly a gratuity of my own free will; thus I found him very attentive to every task. The furniture of the chamber, which certainly dated from the beginnings of the seventeenth century, was now restored to genuine rococo pieces, to their already lost honor.

The Count, enticed by the beautiful fall, was still in the country. I also took advantage of the beautiful weather, mounting Pegasus, and frolicking in the regions of fantasy to my heart's content.

I began the second part of my life, now entirely devoted to art, with “Gellert's Busslied” for voice and piano. This song soon appeared as op. 27 by Kühnel in Leipzig. It was followed by “Four Italian canzonets for a voice with pianoforte”, provided also with German and Czech texts by Professor W.A. Swoboda1, which appeared as op. 28 by Joh. Hoffmann in Prague.

Because I only dedicated the mornings to composition, I could immerse myself in art, entirely undisturbed.

In the afternoons the house-officer frequently visited me, and told me many things that had to do with events affecting the family of the Count Buquoy, among which the visions of spirits, which some of the members of the household mentioned, were not to be forgotten. As has been said: the cashier was a good man, but he was really not capable of interesting conversation; the slow flow of his speech, free of all emphasis, could perhaps have made him an exceptional hypnotist, if it were not for the fact that the absurdities that appeared now and then would dispel the approaching sleep. I still remember vividly how he wellmeaningly advised me never to walk on the diagonals in my room, but only back and forth next to the walls, so as not to disturb her Excellence the Countess, who lived beneath me, by the shaking and clattering of the chandelier hanging from the ceiling of her room - an admonition which I entirely did not understand.

Currently, few musical expressions are as massive and as popular in Colombia as the so-called New Colombian Music (NCM). The term NCM has been used in recent years to refer to a marked tendency between young musicians who seek to “recover and reinterpret the local music” through an ambiguous and undetermined musical form (Santamaria 2). Drawing on other musical genres—for example, bambuco, cumbia, vallenato—that in the past were elevated to the status of “national music,” it is difficult to associate NCM with a specifc region within the Colombian territory. Nonetheless, the NCM label has demonstrated a strategic elasticity to market new national sounds and to connect these with World Music global festivals, as well as with state cultural politics and mass media agenda. Thanks to media dissemination, these “wordly” music productions blur and superimpose local and national identities as well as the public and private divide.

The process of NCM popularization in the national and international arenas has been possible thanks to diverse political, economic, and cultural dynamics: the celebration of cultural diversity that followed the adoption of the new Constitution in 1991; the multicultural rhetoric of the market and certain cultural circuits; the growing importance of cultural industries in the national economy; the constant demographic and migratory movements within and outside the country; the implementation of Colombia Is Passion and The Answer Is Colombia, the two institutional campaigns that branded Colombia and aligned the nation within territorial marketing logics to create an attractive destination for the foreign investor as well as tourists. Significantly, several of these dynamics emerging from the NCM phenomenon can be found in media outlets such as Al Jazeera English's Playlist: “Colombia, although sadly widely known for its drugs trade and violent, internal conflicts, is also witnessing a new musical movement, as a growing number of passionate and vocal musicians are keen to show their country in a new light…. The future of Colombian music may well lie in fusion, as bands seek out international audiences for their unique sounds.”

When surveying the heritage of war and peace, the observer, at least in the Western world, seems to be confronted by a stark contrast: while war is everywhere, peace is hard to find (Gittings 2012). This was already the finding of Erasmus of Rotterdam 500 years ago. In what can be regarded as the first classic in the literature on peace in modern times – The Complaint of Peace (1517) – he deplored the absence of peace, concord and harmony, and the overwhelming presence of war, violent conflict and bloodshed in the world around him. A devout Christian and humanist, he never ceased to condemn as barbaric, immoral, irrational and un-Christian the practice of war and the profession of the soldier which made it possible. ‘No one thundered more eloquently against the evils of war than did the great Erasmus … perhaps the most famous of the humanists’ (Hirten 1946, VI). Sometimes referred to as the first European, he witnessed war and the aftermath of war during his many travels through devastated villages and countryside, meeting beggars, cripples, orphans and widows whose lives had been destroyed or made much more precarious through war (Vanden Branden 1996, 30). He expressed his anger and fury in many writings, including in his extensive correspondence with prominent members of the ruling elite of the time, whom he tried to persuade of the necessity to keep war at bay, and thus preserve their subjects’ happiness and prosperity. Rejecting prevailing views, Erasmus argued that there was nothing glorious or heroic about war, and that rulers should forsake the ‘arts of war’ and learn the ‘arts of peace’ instead (Jardine 1997). Five hundred years later, his complaint and appeal remain as valid as ever. Indeed, the persistence of the practice of war, the military profession and the incessant development of instruments of death and destruction have brought the world perilously close to the extinction of life on earth.

The complexity of reconciliation efforts underscores the importance of good leadership. Importantly, recent experiences have also shown us that women are recognised across the world as powerful agents for change and peace. There are pragmatic arguments that underline the importance of female participation in peacebuilding. Many conflict analysts, regardless of gender, note that the peace being negotiated at a political level must be rooted among and accepted by the people who have to live with it. The input of women – representing at least half the population – is thus indispensable, and consequently women play a vital role in heritage organisations in breaking divisiveness and building peace. For example, women in Liberia forcefully demanded through peaceful demonstration that their government bring about immediate peace and hold democratic elections; this was key to the ending of the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Female leaders from Liberia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Samoa shared compelling accounts of their innovative leadership approaches at a panel event organised by the United States Institute of Peace in 2012 and were recognised for leading change in their transitioning societies (United States Institute of Peace 2012). The power of women to positively influence conflict and crises has been convincingly demonstrated by the 2011 Nobel Peace prize winners Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkol Karman from Yemen. In his words of congratulation, Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Uri Rosenthal said, ‘The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to these three women is a marvellous acknowledgement that women are not victims but current and future leaders’ (Government of the Netherlands 2011).

Innovative approaches to leadership and decision-making are critically important to a process of non-violent change around the world. Effective leadership in such contexts includes innovative ideas and bold risks to make change happen. From film-making to an NGO focused on rehabilitating female child soldiers to creating family businesses in remote places, women have found that staying grounded in the community is important to making a sustainable impact (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands 2011). Women can bring a particularly determined, singleminded and resolute approach which breaks deadlock, forcefully challenges entrenched and prejudiced attitudes and is positive and forward-looking.

In his capacity as precentor of Malmesbury Abbey, William was also its librarian. As expressed in the passage from his Gesta Pontificum quoted above, he had, to his knowledge, supplied the abbey with more books than any of his predecessors. This paper studies that accomplishment from two perspectives. Surveying the corpus of William's extant autographs, I shall first attempt to characterise his objectives with regard to the production of books for the library of his house. Scrutinising one of his autographs in a more detailed manner, I shall then observe how he approached and used his sources when copying books with the assistance of his scribes. These two discussions are in essence commentaries on the quoted extract, and together they seek to form a concise account of how William performed his duty to collect books as librarian.

His hand has been detected in twelve manuscripts. Of these, he was the sole scribe for two, and he collaborated with other scribes for the remaining ten. The two manuscripts by him alone contain the Collectio Canonum Quesnelliana, an early collection of conciliar decrees, and a working copy of his Gesta Pontificum. The remaining ten books include three volumes of ancient classics, two of patristic texts (including William's original collection of extracts from the works of Gregory the Great), two containing works by two medieval philosophers (one Carolingian and one contemporary), an anthology of biblical exegesis, a collection of extracts connected to Roman history from Troy to William's day, and a collection of computistica.

To what extent are these twelve survivors representative of the whole corpus of books made under William's supervision in his role as librarian?

My honorable teacher Woltar had departed this life. Although he often lived in discord and resentment with his wife, he was nevertheless unable to survive her death, and followed her into the grave almost immediately. I had striven to follow his footsteps and make myself at home in Roman law, and was considered a good Romanist - naturally, in as much as one can say this about a young student. This was to lead me into a rather dangerous adventure.

I had found a warm reception at the house of Schwarz, the Land-und Stadtgerichtsdirektors at that time. Now my examination was to take place zur Auskultatur [first stage of training for young jurists — oral examination] and indeed, before two Räten [lawyer/civil servant]. Schwarz, a very good-natured, witty, and only occasionally thoughtless bon vivant asked me whether I were not afraid. This seemed, given my ambition at that time, to be an attack on my dignity as a twenty-year-old. “To the contrary”, I replied impertinently, “I am hoping to have a rather difficult examination”. Schwarz, without the slightest evil intention, said to my examiners: “Watch out for this one, he will give you something to think about.” Naturally such a jest for these worthy men, regarding a boy, was not well-received, and so it may have been the case, that the first Examinator (a certain Justizrat Niewandt, who later proved very kind to me) did not wish to make the test in Roman law any easier for me. “Mr. Candidate,” he asked first, “what is the content of the Lex Julia Papia Popaea?” Such a lex is well known to contain several, often many, legal provisions, which are arranged without any particular order relating to the various branches of law. This is especially the case with regard to the above-mentioned law, in which hundreds (if I am not mistaken) of provisions from the law of inheritance, criminal law, etc. come together in a complete mish-mash. I had studied this section of law very seriously, and was well prepared for an examination on it. But, as often happens, at the moment he asked that question I could not immediately come up with the relevant answer.

The Count of Buquoy, my student in piano playing, cherished the desire to get to know my composition on Bürgers's Lenore, which had already appeared. The piece made such a powerful impression on the Count, that with all his eloquence he told me to give up law, and to start with him as composer. Too honorable to take advantage of his excitement, I asked him to make a decision on this after eight days, when he was tranquil; he, however, after some passage of time was even firmer in his resolve, and in the month of May I entered a very honorable relationship with the house of the Count, which on both sides through the exchange of contractual documents was put on a secure basis, but remained a secret still for his circle. Brother Jakob, who had a position on the Massen estate, near Vienna, as administrator, had married in the meantime, and I traveled there, in the company of my spiritual brother, in order to be an eyewitness of his married happiness.

He and his pretty young wife did what was possible in order to sweeten our stay. After a few days we all traveled to Vienna, and there visited most of the public places, including the art collections, at which a painful feeling took power over me, for I involuntarily thought, in viewing the heaps of treasures, of my poor orphaned Prague, and only the thought, that Prague could be proud of even more valuable and certainly more spiritual treasures, was able to drive the grim feeling from me. How I looked forward to the evening, when I saw on the ticket “Iphigenie auf Tauris by Ritter Glück”! — This was the first of his dramatic works that I saw and heard in performance, though I knew most of his works already from their scores.

If energetic ensemble, beautiful costumes, splendid décor, and especially beautiful voices, with Milder as Iphigenia, Weinmüller as Thoas, Vogel as Orest, and Ehlers as Pilades, under Salieri's canny baton of the excellent orchestra accompanying with the finest delicacy provided the opera with true brilliance, then this performance of Iphigenia belonged to the most exquisite of theatrical contributions.

Peacebuilding is not necessarily always related to armed conflict but to other deep-seated and complex situations. The industrial decline in Sweden described here threatened livelihoods, wellbeing, community and individual sense of place, and created alienation and a sense of unease about how to adapt to change. This chapter is clearly different from others in this collection of essays as it deals with conflicts of a different kind: the impact on local communities in Sweden of the dramatic loss of localised, often small-scale industries. Interestingly, this industrial past has now been identified and acknowledged as heritage, with former industrial sites being used to heal rifts, restore memories, create pride in place and indeed contribute to local economies.

This chapter examines the processes that explain how small communities in Sweden with a conflict-based history around industrial closure and societal decline have used their industrial heritage as assets for local identity and economic renewal. It is based within the context of professional heritage practice but with an outlook on the value and importance of local non-professional engagement. In Sweden today former factories have been turned into around 1450 working life museums co-operating within the network ArbetSam, founded in 1998 (Arbetsam 2013). The museums are distributed widely across the country, this geographical spread and sheer numbers indicating the importance of local non-professional activities with a high degree of community involvement.

Starting from the premise that heritage processes should engage and be of value for people rather than for the heritage sector, it could be argued that local engagement has been far more important than formal heritage practice, and such engagement is a key factor for the use of heritage as a resource for reconciliation and peacebuilding processes. Formal practice is here understood as the operations normally and traditionally performed by the professional field and specifically its weakness for only targeting the tangible properties of heritage assets. Industrial remains and their associated memories have, over time, gained increased meaning and substance for local communities and such locally based non-professional – amateur in its best sense – activities have thus in several cases resulted in de facto reconciliation processes. These processes can be understood as multi-layered.

Along with all that has been mentioned thus far, and an increasingly expanding literary activity — I had supplied detailed articles to the Halle Yearbooks, Caecilia, the Lexicon of Music, etc. — there was yet another special activity that occupied my time and my lively interest, even though its intended goal would remain unachieved.

Already, over the course of several years it had been the intent of the Ministry of Culture to found a Conservatorium of music in Berlin. More than once I had had occasion, or taken the initiative to express my expert opinion on this situation. King Frederick William IV had striven, as soon as he had taken power, to surround himself with famed or beloved personalities from abroad. Thus, among others, the philosopher Schelling, the poet Friedrich Rückert, and the painter Cornelius were invited here.

Schelling already had the heights of his career behind him. He had spent the last few years in Munich without any further literary activity. People talked considerably about his mystical seclusion: how those assigned to him were lead through a shadowy set of gardens into a salon, and there had to wait for him for a long time, until finally other doors would open and the already old man, with long and flowing attire solemnly entered like a wizard.

In Berlin he was supposed to be the replacement for Hegel at the University; the immediate predecessor of Hegel's would thus now be his successor. Hegel had not just died; but the absolute value of absolute philosophy had suffered a notable blow in higher regions, as it appeared. For, while earlier, it was not easy for a philosopher who was not an acquaintance of Hegel to hope for advancement, now there was a considerable yearning to see new paths opened for speculative knowledge. People no longer trusted Hegel's teaching, or did not trust it enough.

Naturally I had already striven to become familiar with Schelling's thinking. Now I could have taken a spot among those listening to him speak. But I felt no yearning, and no express inclination for speculative philosophy generally; I, as former jurist and committed artist craved the reassuring ground of facts and experience.

In May 2008, the founder of the oldest guerrilla group in the contemporary world died. His name was Pedro Antonio Marin—also known as Manuel Marulanda Velez or “Tirofijo” (Sureshot). Marin was the main leader of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejercito del Pueblo (FARC-EP; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People's Army) from its foundation in 1966 to 2008. From a sociohistorical perspective, this guerrilla movement is a consequence of different factors. Perhaps the most important is the agrarian conflict in Colombia based on the distribution of the land (Pizarro, Las FARC [1949–2011]). From a sociopolitical angle, the FARC-EP is the result of a restricted democracy based on an institutionalized bipartisan model of government known as the National Front. However, few articles have been written about the ideology—generally defined as ideas, beliefs, and values—implicit in the way they represent themselves as guerrilla members and support the FARC as a collectivity.

This chapter offers an analysis of seven texts of nonfiction narratives about the FARC-EP and its leaders: Las vidas de Pedro Antonio Marín Manuel Marulanda Vélez Tirofijo (1989), Ciro Trujillo: Páginas de su vida (1974), Tirofijo: Los sueños y las montañas (1994), Colombia y las FARC-EP: Origen de la lucha guerrillera: Testimonio del comandante Jaime Guaraca (1999), Diario de un guerrillero (1970), Diario de la Resistencia en Marquetalia (1972), and Cuadernos de Campaña (1973). All these books were written by guerrilla leaders themselves— like Jacobo Arenas—or by writers who openly sympathized with the FARC cause—such as Luis Alberto Matta—member of the Union Patriotica, a legal political party founded by the FARC, and the Partido Comunista de Colombia (PCC) in 1985. Then, the national government, in the context of peace negotiations with the FARC, opened a political window so that FARC candidates could participate in national elections. For this reason these books are an important “testimony” in literary terms as both an alternative account of the facts offered by those who are excluded from the power and also a self-representation of FARC leaders and their justifications to exist as a guerrilla organization.

Most scholars presume that Colombians have a weak national identity that remains “under construction” and undermines political efforts at state construction (Gonzalez; Bushnell). For example, Fischer states that “the Colombian state is weak because of the weak articulation of the Colombian nation” (186). Political elites are blamed for failing to articulate a strong national identity or produce symbols of national unity (Pecaut; Palacios and Safford; Sousa Santos and Garcia Villegas). This elite failure is said to have resulted in a “fragmented” nation, with people identifying first and foremost with a region or political party instead of the nation-state (Gonzalez, Bolivar, and Vasquez). This “incomplete construction of national identity” is thought to have impeded the state from transcending either geographic or social boundaries (Rodriguez, Garcia-Villegas, and Uprimny, 138).

Explaining Colombian state failure through national failure, however, is a tautological argument. Moreover, it does not shed light into what kinds of collective imaginings Colombians do share. Rather than relying on binary conceptions of national identity as absent or present, I seek to describe the quality and content of at least one component of contemporary Colombian collective imagining. Nation-states are not simply authored by political elite or imaged through print capitalism; the consumption of material commodities, images, and symbols also constructs national identity (Coronil; Anderson). Spectacles invite people to participate in the construction of political power while allowing for contradiction, repetition, the omission of inconvenient truths, partial truth telling, and various interpretations. Gender and the nuclear family provide some of the most easily imitated and elastic scripts for official performances that establish the protocol for public conduct and practices of national belonging, particularly in moments of crisis (Caldeira; Taylor; Wedeen; Norton; McClintock; Butler). Recurrence of these familiar tropes is particularly depoliticizing, naturalizing political decisions and power imbalances.

In this chapter, I argue that Colombians have constructed a collective national identity based on the consumption of coffee culture. Rituals of coffee culture invite citizens to engage in easily recognizable and widely reproduced performances of national belonging. Nationally, the spectacle of the coffee economy unites fragmented regional identities behind the image of one common coffee culture that is marked by the absence of historic inequities. In the first section, I discuss the origins and collapse of the coffee state.