The motif of the bogas in the literary imagination of Jorge Isaacs and candelario obeso

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of Afro-descendant subjectivities and the implications of this representation for the nineteenth century project of nation-building and imagination in Colombia. This assessment is made through an analysis of the literary motif of the bogas in the fiction of Jorge Isaacs and the poetics of Candelario Obeso. It is argued here that Jorge Isaacs, while portraying in his novel María the aforementioned subjectivities as well as their collective communities, interposes stories that sustain a framework of prejudices of wide circulation in his time and, simultaneously, through an oblique
approach, he perceives the racial problematic developing within the process of construction and imagination of the emerging nation-state.