Introduction

Correa’s political jingle – unselfconsciously blending a populist message focused on the sovereignty of Ecuador with a globally recognisable song by a British band – helps introduce the issues addressed by this book. The present study explores the literary representation of Ecuador in the twenty-first century, arguing that contemporary Ecuadorian fiction reimagines Ecuador as a nation marked by a constant interaction with the world beyond its borders. The central argument I develop is that contemporary Ecuadorian writers not only reflect today’s Ecuador in their novels. They also actively construct it from a common ground of experience where, since the late 1990s, interactions and exchanges among Ecuador and other nations are more common than ever before in the country’s history and shape the everyday life of society.

This book’s concern with the literary reimagining of contemporary Ecuador responds to Beatriz Sarlo’s call to explore what she calls the ‘eroded space of the nation’ in Latin America ‘in order to understand a two-century history that cannot be fashionably dismissed and swept away by the thrust of a concept such as globalisation’.2 Beatriz Sarlo, ‘Cultural Studies: Reworking the Nation, Revisiting Identity’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 11.3 (2002), pp. 333–342 (p. 339). More than two decades ago, the Argentine critic called into question the hastiness of dismissing the nation – as a cultural concept as well as a political reality – to blindly follow the world-connecting arguments proposed by globalising perspectives. At the beginning of the new millennium, the possibilities presented by an increasingly technologically, economically and culturally interconnected world cast serious doubts on the ability of the concept of the nation to continue occupying a central role in the understanding of such a world. In this context, when Sarlo voiced her critique, theorists of globalisation were energetically debating how close was the nation to its demise.

From an economic perspective, Kenichi Ohmae declared the end of the nation-state by asking if – in a world where economic borders were progressively disappearing – nations’ ‘arbitrary, historically accidental boundaries are genuinely meaningful in economic terms?’.3 Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 2. Adding to the same debate, Robert Holton explained that the flows of investment, technology, communications and profits across national boundaries were often seen as the most striking symptom of the global challenge to the nation.4 Robert Holton, Globalization and the Nation State, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 97. Similarly, leading theorists of the nation shared the scepticism. Anthony Smith argued that the old faith in the unity and superiority of the nation was shaken. In his study on nations and nationalism, Smith mentioned that not only in Europe, where the European Union and the European citizenship were already building a supranational continent supposedly free of national lines of division, but:

Nevertheless, the 2010s proved that Sarlo’s concern over the hastiness of dismissing the nation was justified. The momentum gained by nationalist movements in the UK, the US, Europe and Latin America put to the test any argument for a globalised world where nations and national limits were of little if any relevance at all. That is to say, in a world where the Brazilian far-right nationalist Jair Bolsonaro led the largest Latin American economy, Donald Trump’s America First guided foreign policy in the US, the UK voted to leave an increasingly divided European Union, where, in turn, national-populist parties were on the rise, the nation seemed to be as relevant as ever.7 Europe’s nationalist scene includes parties from all over the continent, from Spain’s Vox to Italy’s Lega. A survey by the BBC remarks that ‘nationalism has always been a feature across Europe’s political spectrum but there has been a recent boom in voter support for right-wing and populist parties’. See BBC News, ‘Europe and right-wing nationalism: A country-by-country guide’, BBC News, 13 November 2019 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36130006> [accessed 6 December 2021]. Yet the circumstances that were to signify its demise were still there (are still here), and they could not (cannot) be simply dismissed. As Sarlo suggests, new concepts of community must be explored, and a new theory of the nation is needed in the times of the global economy.

The Ecuadorian case analysed here provides an example of how to reimagine the nation for today’s globalised context. Contemporary Ecuadorian literature, which this book defines as a type of writing created from a common ground of experience, a shared historical context shaped by a series of nationwide transformations that took place in Ecuador from 1998, allows an alternative way to understand how the nation can be built by fiction. I argue that contemporary Ecuadorian fiction imagines and constructs Ecuador as a transnational space, that is, a space where transnational encounters are constitutive elements of the living experience of society. By engaging with the experiences that shape Ecuadorian society in the twenty-first century, fiction foregrounds Ecuador as a nation that territorial boundaries cannot limit. That is, as a nation that simultaneously exists – and is imagined from – within its borders as well as beyond them.

The image of a nation that cannot be fixed to its frontiers constitutes a break from the past. In this sense, contemporary Ecuadorian literature reimagines Ecuador also by countering a normative discourse that, since the early twentieth century, had defined the Ecuadorian nation in relation to a politically biased vision of national uniqueness. That is to say, it challenges the model introduced in the 1930s by the most celebrated generation of Ecuadorian writers: the social realist writers of the Generación del 30, championed by Jorge Icaza (Quito, 1906) and his indigenista writing. This generation is traditionally acknowledged, studied and promoted as a cluster of Ecuadorian male authors who portrayed the inner realities of the country, writing and publishing novels and short stories about the real-life struggles of the inhabitants of the different regions of Ecuador, predominantly using the aesthetics of social realism. Their oeuvre is often considered, even today, to constitute the most iconic period of literary development in Ecuador and, overall, the most powerful phenomenon of Ecuadorian letters.

This book sees Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934), the centrepiece of the Generación del 30’s narrative production, as a ‘national novel’. Doris Sommer refers to national novels as ‘the books frequently required in the nations’ secondary schools as sources of local history and literary pride’.8 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 4–6. Considering Huasipungo in this category, which implies the recognition of its canonical position in the cultural field, I argue that the novel established a normative national model, that is, a limited framework to understand what the Ecuadorian nation is and represents. This model frames the Ecuadorian nation in connection to a sense of ‘uniqueness’ to be found in history and territory. It imagines Ecuador through an essentialist approach that – far from being the product of an accurate representation of reality – is a construct reflecting Icaza’s views and derives from a context of cultural and economic disruption triggered by a modernisation project pursued by liberal politics.

Contemporary literature reimagines the nation after the national model Icaza helped to create collapsed at the end of the twentieth century. The collapse was triggered by an economic crisis that, in bankrupting the national economy, also tore down old notions of hard national boundaries. This book is the first to offer a literary perspective for analysing the Ecuadorian economic crisis of 1998, commonly known as the Feriado Bancario. By analysing a novel published in the immediate aftermath – Eliécer Cárdenas’ El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000) – I argue that literature aids us in seeing that the Feriado Bancario constitutes a re-foundational moment for the Ecuadorian nation. Often considered a social catastrophe, this economic event ravaged the financial system of the country and created a set of unprecedented experiences that transformed Ecuador.

The transformations set in motion by the crisis, which have been primarily studied from social sciences perspectives, included the ‘Ecuadorian exodus’, an unprecedented migratory phenomenon in which almost 10% of the national population left the country seeking better economic opportunities in the US and Europe. In addition, the Feriado Bancario also turned Ecuador into the first Latin American country to lose its national currency, the sucre, which was replaced by the US dollar as the national legal tender. Contemporary Ecuadorian fiction engages with and helps us to make sense of the national reality that emerged after the economic collapse. In doing so, literature grounds and shapes a comprehensive understanding of the Ecuadorian nation today.

This book analyses three novels published by three Ecuadorian authors in the last two decades: Leonardo Valencia’s Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos’ Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013) and Gabriela Alemán’s Humo (2017). By close reading these texts, I propose that contemporary Ecuadorian fiction – the fiction that emerges from and, at the same time, is shaped by the legacies of the crisis – navigates national and regional borders and portrays hybridity as a constitutive feature of contemporary Ecuador. That is, the novels of Valencia, Arcos and Alemán form a body of work that reimagines Ecuador as a transnational space. When I advocate for applying a transnational perspective, I also engage with issues that go beyond Ecuadorian or Latin American Studies exclusively. In aiding us to see Ecuador as a transnational space, contemporary Ecuadorian literature participates in and expands a discussion regarding the exhaustion of single-nation frameworks to understand and read literature. That is, it engages with the concerns of World Literature, an institutionalised field of study that can be enriched, I argue, by knowledge offered by the Ecuadorian case reviewed here.

Most approaches to the study of World Literature fall short of explaining Ecuador’s experience. It is so because, in the study of fiction that transgresses national borders, the work of leading scholars in the field has so far privileged the dismissal of the nation as the natural condition for fiction to be thought of globally. Franco Moretti, for instance, proposes discarding national historiographies in order to focus on global patterns.9 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), pp. 54–68 (p. 58). Similarly arguing from Europe, Pascale Casanova advocates for the study of literature as a ‘world republic’ which has its centre in Europe and where Latin America is but a distant periphery.10 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 24. On the other side of the Atlantic, David Damrosch adds that the criteria for evaluating the global potential of novels have to do with aspects such as international circulation and translation into other languages that, in his account of World Literature as construed from the US, often means translation into English.11 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 27. While these explanations are all vital for guiding the issues addressed by this book, they are all similarly susceptible to Sarlo’s critique of unproblematically removing the nation in order to favour globalising views. This book puts forward an alternative perspective: proposing that, as the study of contemporary Ecuadorian literature shows, transgressing the borders of the nation also goes hand in hand with building it.

I argue that contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages with the concerns of World Literature while keeping a focus on the nation. In this sense, it becomes a national literature that informs the study of World Literature from a perspective that does not align with the general direction of a discipline that inaccurately suggests that working on nation-centred foci does not match the underlying conditions of culture anymore. I propose that contemporary Ecuadorian writing is uniquely positioned to offer an alternative path for reflecting on what World Literature is because it is crucially marked by what, informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I am calling a minoritarian condition. Poorly read, circulated and translated, Ecuadorian writing suffers from a lack of recognition both abroad and at home that makes it ‘invisible’ when compared with other Latin American national literatures. While the ‘invisibility’ of Ecuadorian writing would normally prevent novels such as the ones I analyse from being included in the taxonomy of World Literature, I advocate for seeing it instead as an opportunity to reflect on World Literature from a minoritarian perspective.

The invisibility of contemporary Ecuadorian literature is embodied by Marcelo Chiriboga, the Ecuadorian representative of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s who never existed. Created by Carlos Fuentes and José Donoso, Chiriboga is a fictional character who supposedly lived through the 1960s and enjoyed unrivalled global attention thanks to his novels, which were published throughout the world and obtained multiple awards. As such, he fictionally fills the gap left by the lack of Ecuadorian representation in the most celebrated, circulated and translated phenomenon of Latin American letters. But from the real absence that the fake Chiriboga symbolises, emerges an unexplored possibility to think of World Literature. I argue that when studied from its minoritarian position, contemporary Ecuadorian literature reveals a sense of a national space while simultaneously engaging with a global dimension. It is capable of broadening our literary consciousness of the world as a whole without losing focus of the national context from which it emerges. In this sense, it let us see that dismissing the nation is not the only path to advance the study of World Literature. I propose that the study of contemporary Ecuadorian literature suggests an approach to World Literature that is more suited to a twenty-first century in which, regardless of the best hopes of enthusiasts of globalisation, the pull of the nation has transformed itself, but has not subsided.