Settler Horizons, Colonizing Affects: Repetitions in the Archive and the Psychosocial Mapping of Colombian National Identity Available to Purchase

Chapter 3 examines Horizontes, a 1913 painting by Francisco Antonio Cano Cardona that has played an important role in the Colombian national imaginary and processes of subject formation, idealizing a settler mythos and a national sense of self predicated in European political and intellectual history. Relations between the living body, political forces, and the production of settler colonial futures cohere through the social history, ontological impact, and affective modes conveyed through the painting’s visual symbolism. The chapter contributes an anticolonial interpretation of the visual archive of Colombian national art as a psychosocial cartography and sensory invocation of settler colonial affect that orients the Colombian public toward a geographic, ontological, and temporal horizon. It shows how Horizontes entangles Colombian modernity with images from the Age of Discovery to produce national desire and impulse in the service of settler formation and its constitutive projects of New World genocide and land dispossession.