This article explores discourses surrounding the modernisation of the state and the formation of national literature in nineteenth‐century Colombia, examining the racism at the heart of both, particularly in their representation of Afro‐Colombian inhabitants of the lower Magdalena River. Then, drawing on recent accounts of plebeian politicisation, and in a reading of selected poems from Candelario Obeso's Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), it argues that beyond functioning as the medium through which criollos interpellated subalterns as alienated subjects, republican ideology also served as the grounds upon which Afro‐Colombians contested exclusion and negotiated forms of political inclusion.