The first literary geography of the Putumayo, exploring its history and enduring significance through literature of and on this Colombian region by Latin American, US and European writers.

Coming to prominence during the rubber fever of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of political turmoil, a place of mass immigration, exile, subjugation, insurgency, and violence, all of which have fostered a long, international literary history. Colombia's Forgotten Frontier maps a literary map of this history for the first time. Lesley Wylie looks at works by writers from Latin America, the United States, and Europe— including works by Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and Williams Burroughs—in order to examine Colombia's literary legacy of marginality and conflict.

"Forgotten Peace examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. In this book, Robert A. Karl reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history--including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language--Karl provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweeping in scope, Forgotten Peace challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America."--Provided by publisher.

Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia—known locally as “the trampoline of death”—to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means. Considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violence Draws attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the Amazon region Examines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life Incorporates a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories

"This book disputes the commonly held view that Colombia's armed conflict is a result of state absence or failure, providing broader lessons about the real drivers of political violence in war-torn areas"--