Rediscovery in Light of the Future: Territorialization and the Demographic Catastrophe in Colombian Geographic Speculation Available to Purchase

Chapter 4 reads a 1935 Colombian text by statesman Manuel Roca Castellanos, 10 luces sobre el futuro (10 Lights over the Future)—an expression of geographical speculation in the form of a treatise arguing for the consolidation and mapping of Colombia’s political-geographic terrain. The treatise recommends countrywide processes of internal exploration and territorialization via a fourth major wave of internal colonization and settlement while it calls on the conquering energy of the Age of Discovery as the zeitgeist for the Colombian national project. This includes a racialized pathologization and criminalization of black and indigenous groups resisting invasion of their territories. The state projects a cartographic fantasy of settler futures, for which geographic discovery is a central endeavor. In modeling the project of territorialization in the rhetoric and spirit of Columbus’s Discovery of America, it extends the demographic catastrophe of Discovery into the structure of governance itself.