Revisiting the Hidden Transcript: Oral Tradition and Black Cultural Politics in the Colombian Pacific Coast Region

The role of oral traditions in the reconstruction and the politicisation of collective memory has widely been recognised in post-colonial theories. Yet, the concrete application of these oral traditions by subaltern groups in projects of cultural politics has often been an ambiguous and discontinuous process. Moreover, poststructural interventions on cultural politics in social movement research, while theorising culture as a collective and dynamic process that produces meaning and shapes social relations, only rarely look at specific cultural manifestations as a privileged site for examining the construction of a subaltern politics of resistance on the ground. In this paper, I argue for oral traditions to be considered as one such specific manifestation in a subaltern cultural politics. I will elaborate this argument drawing on James Scott's conceptual framework on the public and hidden transcripts of social interaction between dominant and subordinate social groups. Beyond the restricted meaning that Scott ascribes to the hidden transcript as dialectically related to contexts of domination, however, I will extend its meaning and significance by focusing on the processes of transition of certain offstage discourses and practices when they ‘storm the stage’ and become part of the public transcript. Empirically, I will show this to be the case of the changing dynamics of mobilising oral traditions among black communities in Colombia. Through a selection of poems, verse, and stories that I recorded among black populations in the Pacific coast region of this South American country, I will show how these poetic forms as offstage discourses (and hidden transcripts) challenge dominant representations of space and are increasingly mobilised as powerful political tools (and public transcripts) in the struggle for cultural and territorial rights. All quotes, interview transcripts, and poems from the original Spanish into English have been translated by myself.