Affective geopolitics: nation narratives from Colombian students in Chile

ABSTRACT

Motivated by increasing Colombian immigration in Chile, this paper aims to understand the production of Colombian students attuned with the geopolitical discourses on immigrants in Santiago. Inspired by feminist geographers, it considers the nation as an affective device and geopolitics as the power asymmetries resulting from the encounter of different corporealities. Three cases are used to produce narratives about the affective geopolitics influencing Colombian doctoral students in Chile by analysing how their trajectories create unbalanced powers and affect how they live and re-signify their bodies and nationality. The results indicate that, by presenting themselves as Colombians, students are associated with stigmatised Colombian bodies, which include the notions that they are sexually reified, black, poor, and vulgar. At the same time, they try to dissolve the stereotype of the Colombian person in Chile and use their privileged positions as high-skilled graduate students to detach from the great Colombian immigrant flow.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective geopolitics
• student mobility
• international education
• Latin Americans
• gender migration

Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Kath Browne and Professor Mary Gilmartin for their comments, which greatly improved my original draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Drug traffickers from Colombia.

2. A portmanteau of the vulgar term culo in Spanish or arse in English and colombiana or Colombian [woman].

3. ‘arse, arse’.

4. Colombian cyclists of international renown.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Chilean Commission for Science and Technology under the Grant #21160217.