Allegories of Globalization: the United States in Recent Latin American Narrative Alex Conrad Holland Columbus, Georgia MHS

• Allegories of Globalization: The United States in Recent Latin American Narrative Alex Conrad Holland Columbus, Georgia MHS, Auburn University, 2003 BA, Columbus State University, 1997 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese University of Virginia May 2011 Directed by Donald Shaw i ABSTRACT This study examines the interplay of Latin American and North American culture in four novels by established Spanish American authors. Luisa Valenzuela’s Novela negra con argentinos (1990), El plan infinito by Isabel Allende (1991), Linda 67: Historia de un crimen (1995) by Fernando del Paso and José Donoso’s Donde van a morir los elefantes (1995) are each set in the United States of the late 1980s and 1990s. Though all of these novels are purportedly focused on individual relationships, pedaling around the theories of Fredric Jameson and Dorris Sommer I argue that these private romances are also figures for public, trans-national allegories. The love triangles always involve the choice, on the part of the Latin American protagonist, between a fellow Latin American and a North American partner who embodies the highlighted aspects of the surrounding culture. Given the timing of the production of these novels, with the centered promoters of globalization pushing the formation of a new world order in which the nation-state would play a significantly reduced role, these novels provide a counterpoint from the peripheral perspective and reveal the tensions and anxieties involved in integrating the global and the local without the mediation of the national level. Thus, these novels can be seen as literary contributions to the so-called postmodernism debate that heated up in Latin American scholarship in the 1990s. In their sub-texts they deny the desirability of (post)modern North American material culture as worthy of importation to their southern climes and at the same time question the validity of postmodernism as a regionally appropriate theoretical paradigm. The writing back to the center from the periphery, the concern for national and regional identity, and the rejection of absolute relativism all position these works as Latin American postcolonial novels. 1 Americanista Novels: Discourse, Tradition, Globalization —Es así como la visión de una América deslatinizada por propia voluntad, sin la extorsión de la conquista, y regenerada luego a imagen y semejanza del arquetipo del Norte, flota ya sobre los sueños de muchos sinceros interesados por nuestro porvenir […]. Ariel, José Enrique Rodó The 1990s saw the emergence of several novels by established Latin American authors set in the United States. Falling within the purview of this study are Luisa Valenzuela‘s Novela negra con argentinos (1990), El plan infinito by Isabel Allende (1991), Linda 67: Historia de un crimen (1995) by Fernando del Paso and José Donoso‘s Donde van a morir los elefantes (1995). Though none of these, save Novela negra, has received much critical attention, I argue that the publication of these novels in such a cluster is significant for the field of modern Latin American letters, especially for those interested in Hemispheric Studies. It provides the exciting opportunity to take a look into the place of the United States in the contemporary Latin American literary imagination. Throughout this study I will refer to this group of texts as the Americanista novels. This is more a label of convenience than it is an effort in rigorous classification, but it does carry with it some degree of analytical signification as well. The novels are set in the United States, the part of the world most often referred to as America; and they are written by Latin Americans in Spanish, hence the ending –ista. But this handle also reveals some of the goals of this study: first, to show that even though none of these works is focused on life in the United States per se, there is a unified vision of North America contained within them—something like, converting Edward Said‘s Orientalism to our purposes, a North Americanism; and second, to argue that this figuration has just as much to do with Latin America and its relationship with the United States as it does the empirical reality of the latter. 2 For the United States based Latin-Americanist any novel by a Latin American author set in the North America would probably prove intriguing. What would their vision be? How would they present North American life? How would it match up to our experiences, our views? But the publication of four such novels by prominent Latin American literary figures in the space of a few years provided something far more alluring. It provided fertile ground for comparative analysis, to trace the continuities and divergences that would emerge from the four distinct Latin American voices. This group of an Argentine, two Chileans and one Mexican, draws together authors from the most far-flung regions of Latin America and cuts across gender and generation boundaries. While Borges may have quipped that there was no need to visit a place to write a novel about it, this is not the case with these four novelists. Each of them had spent considerable time living and working in the United States. This is an important fact, because this would allow them the personal experience to help circumvent or negotiate the already existent body of Latin American writing on the United States, most notably by the late 19th and early 20th century production of José Martí, Rubén Darío, José Enrique Rodó and José Vasconcelos. Though the alleged object of these earlier writers was to foment a spirit of Pan- Latin American fraternity among the various nations of the American continent, their work also focuses a great deal on the United States. Their constant allusions to an essential North American character build what must be considered an incipient discursive formation. Discourse here is employed along the lines of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Foucault elaborated his idea of discourse and discursive formations across his theoretical production, most notably in the Archaeology of Knowledge, The Order of 3 Things and Discipline and Punish. To offer a brief summation we might suggest that discourses are statements aimed at a specific object of study which is always simultaneously constituted and described by those statements. This discourse creates a specific subject position with regard to the object and carries an implied relation of power. Discursive formations are the collections of such discourse over time that reveal systemic patterns contained within such statements. Of course it is Said‘s Orientalism that offers the most direct support for the present study as he concentrates on the discourses found in literature and applies discourse theory to geographic entities. Where I examine the United States in the literary imagination of Latin America, Said analyzes the entrance of the Orient into the Western imagination as a discursive formation. Said‘s concept of Orientalism has paved the way for other scholars to investigate the way power, scientific (or realistic) knowledge and imaginative writing become unexpected bedfellows in the production of broad cultural viewpoints. Clearly, my study is deeply concerned with the intersection of power and knowledge in the construction of geographic difference: a Latin American North America. It would be careless to say, however, that I am looking at the Orientalization of the United States by Latin American authors. This is tempting, and at some level it holds a certain amount of truth, but there are several important differences between the relationship of Latin America and the United States that prevent the facile application of Orientalism to the present study. While many of the analytical tools such as the concept of othering, discursive formations, the archive, and the problem of political versus ―pure‖ knowledge are shared, the historical differences between the case for Orientalism and the Latin American 4 production of an Other America require significant changes in scope, methodology and focus. Edward Said took Foucault‘s method of discourse analysis and applied it to relations between the West and the Orient. The most obvious difference between Orientalism and the phenomenon that I am studying is that, in focusing on Latin America, I am focusing on the opposite side of the discursive field in relation to geopolitical power. Where Said traced the discourse of the Orient as it was produced by those Western nations that held in conjunction with the control of their own cultural production, actual physical territory in some cases and at the very least hegemonic power over the Orient, this study traces discursive formations produced by those in the zone against which hegemonic and direct military control was deployed. Thus while Orientalism is attached to a tradition of the geopolitical dominators, the discourse from Latin America emerges from a tradition of the geopolitically dominated. Nevertheless, there are several concepts that do hold my study and Orientalism in a certain field of resemblance. The most fundamental may be the idea of the Other and of othering. These ideas can be traced back to the writings of Hegel. Hegel theorized that the self-awareness of an individual is always dependent on the encounter of that individual subject with another human being. This is the Other: the human object that functions as the limit of selfhood and sameness. When we conceive of and define what the Other is, we are also always defining our selves. The Other, therefore is a necessary and constitutive element in subject identity formation, but it also applies to the social. The unity of the subject or of the society is held together by the process of outgrouping: excluding, opposing and the creation of an overt or implied hierarchy.

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