Literary deterritorializations (and reterritorializations). Notes on the literature of no fixed abode in current Latin American narrative: tensions between the global and the localbal and local

Abstract

Modern day Latin American narrative is full of characters in permanent uprooting, crossing borders and territories, thus conferring a new subjectivity pervaded by a lack of a stationary residence. New generations of Latin American authors live in constant displacement, unlike the voluntary exile of the “Boom” generation writers or the forced exile of those who had to escape dictatorships in the seventies. This new “Geography of belonging”, in words of Fernando Aínsa, has created new maps of belonging, alien to univocal notions of identity and homeland. At the same time, however, an important theme of this new Latin American narrative refers to a return to forgotten countries, nearby towns and internal territories, where a different way of life is portrayed as opposed to the rest of the country. In all of them, regional spaces acquire a life of their own, and are referred to as “Stories, spaces and people (far from) a global idea”, in words of Martín Caparrós.