Abstract
Literacy and literature were central to the birth of the modern nation state. Yet few studies explore the importance of literature in contemporary state construction. In this article, the ongoing importance of literacy and literature in (re)producing the Colombian nation state is studied. Since the colonial era, literacy has conferred the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, first to an elite few and now to the vast majority of people. The democratization of the ability to author the nation has allowed common people to contest and contribute to elite narratives. In this article the content of competing stories of the nation state is analyzed. It argues that these writings have had contradictory effects, successfully consolidating national identity as a nation swathed in violence while undermining the state by revealing its inability to provide security for the majority of its citizens.
