The stifling embrace of the colonial power: Otherness, in-betweenness, and conversion of life in the film Embrace of the Serpent

El abrazo asfixiante del poder colonial: Otredad,tercer espacio y conversión de la vida en lapelícula El Abrazo de la Serpiente

Embrace of the Serpent is a 2015 Colombian film directed by Ciro Guerra. In this paper, I present an analysis of the film through a postcolonial framework to answer an overarching question: How is the colonial power assimilated and contested? The answer addresses two intersecting dimensions. First, I examine the four main characters and their relationship with Homi Bhabha´s notion of the “in-between” spaces produced by the articulation of differences between the colonizer and the colonized. I argue that each one of these characters represents a different degree or form of “in-betweenness.” Second, I look at the consequences of colonialism through the presence of Catholic Missions and rubber plantations in the Amazon. I claim that the film frames religious and economic ideologies as acting together in constituting renewed bodies and territories through the destruction of different forms of being in the world. Overall, Embrace of the Serpent offers a polychromatic screen to analyze the intersection of conceptual frameworks that are central to address the questions that emerge from postcolonial scholarship.