Viewed together,
Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga,
Humo and
Kazbek provide
a common framework to reimagine Ecuador. It is a reimagining that discards any arguments in favour of territorial uniqueness and national purity in order to echo the migrations, flows, movements and interactions precipitated by the
Feriado Bancario. However, more than merely mirroring social reality, these novels are also part of the response to the emergence of this reality. As texts that do not only help us to comprehend but also engage in cultural shifts, they contribute to reimagining Ecuador. This is the case because creating the nation is a recurrent activity: each generation reinterprets, rediscovers and reconstructs their nation in the light of their myths, memories and symbols.
1 Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), p. 206. Contemporary Ecuadorian literature calls for an Ecuador of its own, adapted to the state of interconnectedness that Ecuadorians daily experience in the twenty-first century. As such, the novels of Arcos, Alemán and Valencia aid us to reimagine Ecuador as a nation that exists in constant dialogue and exchange with the world beyond its borders. But they make clear that such ‘outside world’ can be found not only beyond the national territory but also within it.
Contemporary Ecuadorian literature flourishes in the context of narrative that questions and expands categories formerly coined by national frameworks. It is in this area where Julio Ortega interrogates the authority of flattening categorisations, encouraging us to place our scholarly attention on the ‘contactos, intercambios, negociaciones, fracturas, cruces y mezclas de los lenguajes que construyen espacios de afincamiento y estrategias de migración, dispositivos de articulación y prácticas de entramado y anudamiento’.
2 Julio Ortega, ‘Prólogo’, in Nuevos hispanismos interdisciplinarios y transatlánticos, ed. by Julio Ortega (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010), pp. 9–19 (p. 10). Nonetheless, seen from the transnational perspective I apply in this chapter, the works of Arcos, Alemán and Valencia do not stop there: they also open up more paths for further enquiry. That is, considering the position of Ecuadorian literature against the backdrop of Latin American literature, the analysis I propose in this chapter enables a challenge to the postulates of a discipline that discards national historiographies to focus on the broadening of a world consciousness through writing. My point here, which drives the reasoning behind the next and final chapter of this book, is that while my views on contemporary Ecuadorian literature place it somewhat in tune with Ortega’s theory, they also expand it, providing further insights on issues of globality for scholarship on Latin American and World Literature.
When considered through the lens I advocate in this section, contemporary Ecuadorian literature contributes to the knowledge in the discipline by problematising the ways in which certain national Latin American literatures integrate into the category and the study of World Literature. Writers such as the ones I analyse here feed current explorations on the effects of exchanges between ‘outsides’ and ‘insides’ and the revaluation of the boundaries of the region, thereby engaging with the wider issues that the study of globality in literature focuses on. However, the particularity that enables an alternative perspective is that they do so from a country that develops its literary production in the peripheries of the most recognisable phenomena of Latin American letters and remains among the least recognisable literary producers in the region. The study of World Literature from the position of a national literature that, as I will soon explain, is at once part of Latin American literature and excluded from it, adds underexplored layers of meaning to a scholarship that privileges Eurocentric and Anglophone-centric perspectives. In the following chapter, I set out to revise how – from a minoritarian position but connecting itself to a transnational dimension – Ecuadorian literature questions the authority of some of the major models that have set the course of the study of World Literature. By being poorly circulated and translated when circulation and translation remain crucial measurements to qualify or disqualify the global potential of a work of literature, I argue that contemporary Ecuadorian literature becomes an ‘invisible literature’ that challenges and expands thinking on World Literature.