I privilege a transnational approach as the framework to address and discuss the literary imagining of Ecuador. Although there are multiple definitions available for a term that spans several fields of study, from the social sciences to the humanities, transnationalism is understood here as a concept that defines the ways in which reciprocal dependencies and cultural networks among nations reveal or manifest themselves in the different aspects of the living experience of a society. These are, in short, multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions beyond the borders of their nation-states. As Steven Vertovec explains, it is the collective attributes of these linkages and exchanges, ‘their processes of formation and maintenance, and their wider implications’ that are referred to as ‘transnationalism’.
1 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 2. By advocating for a transnational approach, I choose to focus my attention on linkages among peoples and institutions across national territories, their processes of formation and their implications.
As the term is applied in this book, transnationalism fundamentally implies a sense of exchange and encounter. This derives from a stretching of or going beyond national borders, be that in cultural, spatial or temporal terms.
2 Emma Bond, ‘Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies?’, Italian Studies, 69.3 (2014), pp. 415–424 (p. 416). Without denying their existence, transnationalism proposes that the territorial limits of nation-states are not containers of exclusively national experiences. National borders are to be seen as porous entities whose openings allow the development of back-and-forth relationships among nations, peoples and institutions, thereby transforming cultures and practices. Global businesses, instantaneous electronic media and the movement of millions around the globe today render those national borders more porous than ever before.
3 Elisabeth Hermman, ‘How Does Transnationalism Redefine Contemporary Literature’, in Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. by Elisabeth Hermman, Carrie Smith-Prei and Stuart Taberner (New York: Camden House, 2015), pp. 19–43 (p. 1). The cultures, polities and frameworks of understanding that they are imagined to contain are among the elements that go through the boundaries, in a fluidity that defines peoples and nations.
In so far as they all signify exchanges and encounters, transnationalism refers to various related phenomena, ranging from social formations and cultural identifications to economic practices. In this sense, the study of transnationalism pays attention to human networks that, powered by migration and communication technologies, span across vast spaces loosening the bonds between people and territories and rendering strictly bounded senses of locality obsolete. In these contexts, where people in migration destinations are connected to others in their homelands and vice versa, transnational approaches pay attention to the individuals’ awareness of being home away from home. Such an awareness of displacement becomes a type of consciousness urging them to maintain identities that link them simultaneously to more than one place, thereby resisting ideas of identity-fixation and countering absolute definitions as well as hard categorisations.
4 Steven Vertovec, ‘Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22.2 (1999), pp. 447–462 (p. 450).By concentrating on displacement, the study of transnationalism entails shedding light on cultural transformations. That is, on the combination of local/national and global/foreign elements that manifests in hybrid identities, where facets of culture and identity are often self-consciously selected, syncretised and elaborated from more than one heritage.
5 Vertovec, ‘Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism’, p. 451. Similarly, a focus on movement inevitably involves economic practices that transgress borders. Not only by referring to corporations operating simultaneously in more than one country, but also by bringing into the picture the interrelation of national economies and the fact that a great number of them depend or have depended on monetary transfers from nationals abroad.
6 Vertovec, ‘Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism’, p. 453. Many Latin American states are included in this category, and Ecuador is one of them.
People moving across national borders act as living metaphors of the flows that transnationalism signifies. However, it is essential to note that when referring to the impacts of transnationalism, I am referring here not only to migration processes. That is to say, it is not only about migrants and their families. Transnationalism occurs ‘among people who travel regularly between specific sites, who mainly stay in one place of immigration but engage people and resources in a place of origin, and who have never moved but whose locality is significantly affected by the activities of others’.
7 Vertovec, Transnationalism, p. 19. Therefore, my interests are centred on the nation-wide transformations that result from transnational exchanges. In other words, they are by no means limited to migration or migration-related phenomena.
This book positions itself within the context of what Paul Jay defines as the ‘transnational turn’ of literary studies. In his 2010 book
Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Jay argues that ‘since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s, nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism’.
8 Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 1. I choose to see the transnational through fiction not only because literature has the power to reflect complex and ambiguous realities, but also because – as Paul White remarks – literature can do much more than reflecting on the circumstances that led to its creation: ‘a given corpus of writing also becomes a cultural force with the power to influence (and not just reflect) social mentalities’.
9 Paul White, ‘Geography, Literature and Migration’, in Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration, ed. by Russell King, John Connell and Paul White (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–20 (p. 15). Writing is capable of exploring, making sense of and responding to the transformations nations go through in transnational realities.
This book dialogues with the work of Reindert Dhondt and Dagmar Vandebosch in their coedited volume
Transnacionalismo e hibridez en el ensayo hispánico (2016), where they examine how not only fiction but also essays question old national categories without disregarding their relevance.
10 Transnacionalidad e hibridez en el ensayo hispánico, ed. by Reindert Dhondt and Dagmar Vandebosch (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Similarly, it speaks to issues addressed by Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara in their
Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature (2017), a study that proposes to move beyond the study of Hispanic letters on a nation-by-nation basis by favouring a ‘postnational’ framework. Even when both terms are often used interchangeably, ‘postnational’ and ‘transnational’ evoke related yet different meanings. Scharm and Matta-Jara argue that they prefer ‘postnational’ over ‘transnational’ because they consider that, in Latin American and Latino studies, the ‘transnational’ has been mostly applied for the exploration and discussion of hybrid identities, especially when it comes to the analysis of migrant subjectivities. In contrast, they say, ‘the postnational simply refers to the expansion of a planetary consciousness that redirects the gaze outward’.
11 Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara, ‘Introduction’, in Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature, ed. by Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2017), pp. 1–29 (p. 8). Scharm and Matta-Jara believe that ‘postnational’ perspectives better express the questioning of the nation as a defining category, but they also recognise that postnational perspectives can be transnational and vice versa. My intention here is not to redirect the gaze outward. At least, not entirely. Rather, I hope to see the ways in which the nation as an imagined construct is affected by encounters and exchanges. In the Ecuadorian case, migrants play a critical role in the creation and development of these encounters and exchanges and recognising their identities as hybrid is part of my analysis. Hence, my preference for
trans- over
post- is informed both by the objectives of my research and the particularities of the Ecuadorian experience.
Even when there are other terms that signify – or have been applied to signify – the literary questioning of national borders, including postnationalism and also cosmopolitanism, I consider a transnational perspective the best-fitting approach for the objectives of this study. This is because the study of transnationalism acknowledges that, even when it appears to challenge and weaken it, there is a persistence of the nation in trans
nationalism. Cosmopolitan viewpoints, as Lidia Santos explains, devote their attention to works of literature that purposely seek to erase ‘todas las huellas de la nacionalidad’ in order to easily fit in a global and deterritorialised literary market.
12 Lidia Santos, ‘El cosmopolitanismo de mercado: del fin de las literaturas nacionales a la cultura de las celebridades (Brasil, México y Chile)’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 69 (2009), pp. 153–165 (p. 158). Transnationalism, on the other hand, prompts us to think more closely about the ways fiction written in a particular time and in a particular place ‘connects to, circulates through, and is rechannelled by global patternings and global debates on identity’.
13 Elisabeth Hermman, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, ‘Introduction: Contemporary German-Language Literature and Transnationalism’, in Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. by Elisabeth Hermman, Carrie Smith-Prei and Stuart Taberner (New York: Camden House, 2015), pp. 1–16 (p. 1). That is, transnational views are critically marked by context: in this study, by the national context of Ecuador. As such, this book attempts to hold the nation and the global in tension with one another, aiming to provide a path to reflect on how contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages with the world without ceasing to be a literature that, in the twenty-first century, reimagines and rebuilds the Ecuadorian nation.