Conclusion
This book began by putting forward one deceptively simple question: how is contemporary Ecuadorian literature reimagining the Ecuadorian nation? I stress that this is a deceptively simple thing to ask because, while it is widely acknowledged that Latin American writing has played a historical role in imagining and reimagining what Latin American nations are or are to be, the concept of the nation has been highly questioned in the last decades. I refer to the nation not only as a cultural construct but as an organising principle for literature as well. In this light, one could argue in favour of the straightforwardness of asking how contemporary Ecuadorian writers are reimagining the nation that their predecessors and other Latin American letrados had built through narration before. Nonetheless, that question is problematised by the context from which it emerges. That is, a global scenario where thinking of nations seems to be less relevant than before. Globalisation renders national frontiers seemingly irrelevant, especially when considering that not only can books easily travel physically throughout the globe, but they can also be instantly available through the Internet. Similarly, writers rarely limit themselves to one particular territory. International circulation and translation, for instance, have opened up room for focusing on globality and World Literature, rather than placing the locus of analysis on the old-fashioned nation.
Yet the nation is hardly gone. In the late 2010s, when the research for this book was being carried out, nationalist movements in the UK, the US, Europe and Latin America either coming to power or to the forefront of national politics put in serious doubts arguments for a globalised world where nations and national limits had little if any relevance at all. Some sociologists, who have made the case to term these movements ‘neo-nationalists’, argue that their popularity in Western Europe is fuelled by voters who seek – in the old-fashioned idea of the nation – economic, social, and cultural protection from the forces of globalisation.
1 Mureen A. Eger and Sarah Valdez, ‘Neo-Nationalism in Western Europe’, European Sociological Review, 31.1 (2014), pp. 115–130 (p. 117). This book dialogues with such a context of disbelief in the dismissal of the nation. However, it does so by recognising that, while the nation continues to be critically important for understanding today’s world, it needs to be thought of by factoring in the nuances of the present. I have shown that contemporary Ecuadorian literature is thoroughly engaged in such a process. The writers I have analysed contribute to the reimagining of the Ecuadorian nation in narrative, but they do so by engaging with a transnational dimension. Their writing lays bare the multiple exchanges between Ecuador and other parts of the world that naturally occur in the everyday lives of Ecuadorians: from migration-related contacts to foreign signifiers taking hold in the representation systems of society.
Novels like the ones I have studied here reveal that the legacies of the Feriado Bancario profoundly shape the Ecuadorian nation of the twenty-first century. They let us see that the economic crisis of 1998, with its migration phenomenon and dollarisation of the national economy, is a watershed moment for the national community. After the turn of the millennium, that is, in the aftermath of the banking collapse, to reflect on contemporary Ecuador it became compelling to challenge the notions of national authenticity and rigid boundaries based on territory and history that had been key to building the political discourse of the nation in the past century. By doing so, we can see that contemporary Ecuador – as a nation that simultaneously exists within its territory and beyond – differs radically from the nation that was normatively envisioned before. Contemporary Ecuadorian writing does not limit itself to providing a framework to understanding this new nation; it also contributes to its creation.
Acknowledging that contemporary Ecuadorian literature reimagines the nation through its transnationality is significant for reflecting on how we read and study literature today. One leading trend proposes discarding national frameworks and focusing on globality and World Literature. However, this book has shown that to reflect and build globality in narration does not necessarily mean discarding the nation. On the contrary, the study of the case of contemporary Ecuadorian literature adds to the knowledge in the field that writers are also thinking globally through national experiences. This provides an alternative path to consider for the study of World Literature, a path that pays attention to literary developments that exceed widespread parameters for cataloguing world novels. The case of contemporary Ecuadorian literature invites us to think of novels that can convey globality, novels that can inform our understanding of the contemporary world, from critically unattended minor spaces in global literary systems or world republics of letters. The writing that originates in these invisible spots is capable of building the national and the global at the same time. Moreover, it demonstrates that, to fully understand global phenomena, we also need to see them from national angles.
To reach these conclusions, this book firstly examined the normative discourse of nation that Ecuadorian literature built in its most recognised period of development: the social realist narratives of the 1930s. Chapter I revised Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo, Ecuador’s national novel, to argue that it contributed to establishing an enduring discourse of what Ecuador was and was to be. Icaza’s imagining of Ecuador – and that of his peers from the Generación del 30 – was integral to the liberal political project of his time. As such, in Huasipungo, the Ecuadorian nation was marked by a supposed authenticity given by its history and territory. Critically recognised nationally and internationally, the novel achieved a consecrated position in the cultural field. Until today, Icaza’s novel occupies a privileged position in Ecuadorian letters and remains the go-to Ecuadorian novel in scholarly introductions and guides to Latin American literature.
Nonetheless, the national discourse promoted by Icaza has been challenged by contemporary literature. Chapter II proposed that a nationwide event, the economic collapse that started in 1998, disrupted the frameworks for understanding Ecuador by the end of the millennium. Close reading Eliécer Cárdenas’ novel El oscuro final del Porvenir, I argued that literature adds a layer of understanding to think about the effects of the crisis, allowing us to see the Feriado Bancario as a watershed moment for the Ecuadorian nation. That is, an event that marked a sense of before and after for the national community. Its consequences changed Ecuador by making transnational interactions more visible than ever before in the country’s history. My reading of Cárdenas’ novel suggests that, in depicting the crisis, El oscuro final del Porvenir also flags the need to reimagine the nation by considering its increasing contact with the world beyond national boundaries.
The writing that emerged from the common ground of experience shaped by the effects of the Feriado Bancario, which I refer to as contemporary Ecuadorian literature, is explored in Chapter III. By analysing three novels published after 2000 – Carlos Arcos’ Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Leonardo Valencia’s Kazbek and Gabriela Alemán’s Humo – I argued that contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages in a process of navigating boundaries. Writers dislodge discourses of identity from fixed places and embrace an understanding of the Ecuadorian nation as a space that cannot be confined to territorial frontiers, not because frontiers do not exist, but because they are spaces to navigate across. Moreover, I posited that contemporary Ecuadorian literature articulates hybridity as a challenge to the literary tradition embodied by Icaza’s Huasipungo. Far from conforming to the ideals of uniqueness and territory, the work of the contemporary authors studied in this book reflects an Ecuador where the tags of local and national as well as foreign and global are in permanent dialogue. As such, they reimagine the nation by bringing to light the transnational fabric of contemporary Ecuador.
The final chapter of this book discussed the implications of examining contemporary Ecuadorian literature from a transnational perspective. I claimed that, by reimaging Ecuador as a transnational space, contemporary authors engage with a broader discussion regarding the exhaustion of single-nation frameworks for understanding and reading literature. The Ecuadorian case explored here provides an exceptional example of how writing from the peripheries of the global literary market proposes alternative ways to approach World Literature. To grasp its contribution, I argued, we need to analyse it from its minoritarian position and not just in spite of it. I concluded that when we do so and notice their construction of the national as defined by the transnational, we also see how Arcos’, Alemán’s and Valencia’s novels become capable of articulating globality without losing focus on the national context from which they emerge.