This book is divided into four chapters. The first three are structured around the analysis of novels that are useful to interrogate the literary representation of Ecuador in particular times and historical contexts. The analysis in the first three chapters leads to the discussion I present in the fourth. Chapter I introduces a rereading of the early twentieth-century Ecuadorian literary tradition, revising Huasipungo as well as canonical critical work on Icaza’s novel. My analysis brings into play and questions readings of how the novel engages in nation-building. I propose that Huasipungo lays bare an early (but already in motion) transnationality in Ecuador, even when it also establishes a normative vision of what the nation is that dismisses how exchanges and encounters are part of its fabric. Chapter II offers a theoretical perspective that combines criticism on economics and culture to provide a way of thinking about how an economic event, the Feriado Bancario, can be thought of as re-foundational of the nation that Icaza’s fiction helped to conceive. I analyse Eliécer Cárdenas’ El oscuro final del Porvenir to show how fiction begins to respond to the nationwide transformations brought about by the economic crisis. I focus on Cárdenas’ novel’s cultural significance for revealing that a new kind of writing becomes possible after the banking collapse.
The new writing, which I define as contemporary Ecuadorian literature, is considered in Chapter III. I argue that Leonardo Valencia’s Kazbek, Carlos Arcos’ Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga and Gabriela Alemán’s Humo showcase some of the common preoccupations of a body of work that is deeply marked by the legacies of the Feriado Bancario. These are novels that question and transgress national borders. At the same time, they are works of fiction that acknowledge that hybridity is at the heart of today’s Ecuador. As such, they reimagine contemporary Ecuador as a transnational space, shaped by reciprocal dependencies and cultural networks with the rest of the world. In reimagining contemporary Ecuador transnationally, the works of Valencia, Arcos and Alemán engage with a study of literature that broadens our consciousness of the world as a whole, a discussion whose implications are presented more fully in Chapter IV. Here, I discuss how my analysis of contemporary Ecuadorian literature helps us to rethink World Literature from a minoritarian position. As such, I unite the methodological contribution offered by this book with a contribution to understanding texts that, like the ones I study, dialogue with the world even when they circumvent standard parameters for identifying ‘world’ novels. The concluding remarks highlight the implications of my findings for future studies on Latin American contemporary literature, especially for thinking about the impacts of crises on the region’s literary development and on alternative understandings of World Literature.
The research that this book presents is partly shaped by my own positionality as an Ecuadorian scholar working in UK academia. I am aware that my experience of being an Ecuadorian academic lecturing in a British university informs and has a degree of influence over the arguments presented in this study. My personal experience resonates with the movements, displacements and transnational connections explored in the following chapters. As such, I consider that my enquiry is strengthened by my first-hand knowledge of the Ecuadorian literary experience, which – since I first arrived at London in 2014 – has been put in dialogue with multidisciplinary research carried out in Latin America, the US, the UK and continental Europe. In a way, this study also illustrates the issues it explores. It is marked by exchanges and encounters among diverse personal experiences and scholarly perspectives. Still, it must be noted that, hereafter, when I say that something allows us to reflect on something else, that us relates to an academic subjectivity traversed by the background I have hereby disclosed.