Violence, Slow and Explosive

The plot of Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos (2007, The Armies) is set amidst the most violent period of the Colombian civil war. While focused on event-centered violence, Los ejércitos provides a literary insight into other forms of attritional or systemic violence. This chapter appeals to Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and Slajov Žižek’s notion of objective violence to analyze how the long-term consequences of the conflict are represented in the novel. This examination entails connecting these forms of violence with the spectral topographies present in the novel. It shows how Los ejércitos addresses collective trauma and challenges the binaries implied by the concept of slow violence.