We are yet to fully comprehend and acknowledge the contributions of minor literatures to World Literature. This is, in my view, a critical task to do if we want to draw a comprehensive literary picture of our contemporary world. Following Pheng Cheah, I also see World Literature as literature that is an active power in the making of the world. Cheah defines the ‘world’ not only as a spatio-geographical entity but also as ‘an ongoing dynamic process of becoming’, something that is continually being made and remade.
1 Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 42. World Literature, he argues, is writing that is able to play a role in the ongoing creation of the world in at least two ways: ‘Through the powers of figuration, it enables us to imagine a world. But more important, through the pleasure it arouses in us and our desire to share this pleasure through universal communication, literature and its criticism enhance our sense of (being a part of) humanity.’
2 Cheah, p. 44. In this light, to fully imagine the world and continue expanding our sense of being part of humanity, we need to fully consider the literatures of the world. Considering the case study this book presents, what I mean here is that, even if contemporary Ecuadorian literature does not meet worldliness parameters centred on translation and circulation effectively, it does inform a representation of the world, and it affects how we see and inhabit the world. Uncovering the world that contemporary Ecuadorian literature creates is a future research strand illuminated and facilitated by this book.
The novels studied here chart possible paths to follow for reading and understanding the world that Ecuadorian writing creates. Carlos Arcos’ Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, for instance, brings attention to the complexities of indigeneity in contemporary Ecuador. Indigenous communities, however, contest the notion of hybridity that the characters of Arcos’ novel represent so vividly. The Ecuadorian indigenous movement has largely based its political demands on identity claims based on ethnic differentiation. This strategy, which depends on indigenous people carrying visible markers of their indigeneity to be set apart from non-indigenous people, is deemed necessary by indigenous political leaders who consider globalisation a threat to their identities. Luis Macas, former leader of the Conaie, Ecuador’s largest indigenous organisation, declared that:
Después de la década del 90, el movimiento indígena está viviendo una crisis de transición, en términos de proceso. Esta crisis, estimo, se da porque hoy las condiciones internas y externas en las que nos desenvolvemos son distintas; y mucho más difíciles, pues la globalización es arrasante con las diferencias y particularidades, con las diferentes identidades.
3 Cited in Víctor Bretón, Cooperación al desarrollo y demandas étnicas en los Andes ecuatorianos: ensayos sobre indigenismo, desarrollo rural y neoindigenismo (Quito: Flacso, 2001), p. 2. Contemporary literature contests the essential nature of an indigeneity endangered by globalisation’s pull, but – in Arcos’ novel – it does so from the perspective of a mestizo author. We still need an approach that problematises and analyses hybridity in contemporary Ecuador while considering the needs of Ecuadorian indigenous populations in the context of their political projects within and beyond the nation-state. Literature may help us understanding the complexities of indigeneity in twenty-first century Ecuador, where – contrary to Macas’ belief – particularities are not being erased but transformed. At the same time, it can help us in seeing and foregrounding the contributions of Ecuadorian indigeneity to the ongoing creation of the world.
Expanding the notion of nomadism in Leonardo Valencia’s Kazbek is also a future path of enquiry. The nomads of contemporary Ecuadorian literature are yet to be identified and thoroughly studied. In a country where, especially after the banking crisis, migration has been so commonly tied to the pursuit of better economic futures abroad, the free movement of nomads presents an alternative puzzle. Not necessarily untroubled by money but wandering around the world not only because of it, nomads are key for fully understanding nations transnationally: their agency to cross borders illuminates the nuances of navigating the national spaces beyond the limitations of migrant work. And if – as Rosi Braidotti advocates – we relate gender to nomadism, the study of the nomadic subjectivities can also pave the way to scholarly perspectives with a focus on gender that remain underexplored in contemporary Ecuadorian literature.
The migration phenomenon precipitated by the economic crisis in Ecuador transformed gendered structures. As I explained by referring to social sciences data, the Ecuadorian migration phenomenon was primarily feminine: women formed the majority of early migrants as they were more likely to find employment in caregiving positions in the receiving countries.
4 Francesca Lagomarsino and Andrea Torre, El éxodo ecuatoriano a Europa. Jóvenes y familias migrantes. Entre discriminación y nuevos espacios de ciudadanía (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2007), p. 20. Their work often developed into the primary income for their households. As such, they became the main breadwinners for their families, precipitating a transformation of traditional gendered family roles. The prominent role women gained in the aftermath of the economic crisis is mirrored by their ascent to the spotlight of literary creation in Ecuador. I am in no way suggesting that, before 1998, Ecuadorian women’s writing was unimportant. Far from that. However, it is undeniable that, in the last decades, women have come to occupy the forefront of the limited international attention that Ecuadorian literature receives. Gabriela Alemán is but one example of that.
In 2019, the Spanish edition of
The New York Times published an article titled ‘Las escritores ecuatorianas hacen historia’. The piece, authored by the literary critic Jorge Carrión, reviews some of the Ecuadorian female authors publishing and being recognised for their literary merits internationally. The article names Alemán alongside others such as Mónica Ojeda (Guayaquil, 1988), who was included in the Bogotá 39 selection of 2017 as one of the most promising young writers from Latin America. By referring to the history of Ecuadorian writing in the regional context, Carrión proposes that: ‘Lo que están logrando las nuevas narradoras ecuatorianas no tiene precedentes. La fuerza y la calidad de sus propuestas se han visto acompañadas por un contexto de recepción finalmente favorable. Con ellas la literatura ecuatoriana entra en el mapa internacional.’
5 Jorge Carrión, ‘Las escritorias ecuatorianas hacen historia’, The New York Times, 28 April 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/es/2019/04/28/espanol/america-latina/escritoras-ecuador-metoo.html> [accessed 14 January 2020]. Although I disagree with Carrión’s proposal when he suggests that it is only now with these female writers that Ecuadorian literature enters international literary cartographies, I recognise his overarching point: never before has the Ecuadorian literary landscape been dominated so firmly by women. Another of the authors referred by Carrión in
The New York Times, María Fernanda Ampuero (Guayaquil, 1976), offers an explanation by referring to decisive feminist achievements. Interviewed by the Spanish newspaper
El País after the publication of her collection of short stories
Pelea de gallos (2019), Ampuero argues that Ecuadorian cultural institutions used to diminish women’s contributions but there has been a significant change in the dynamics:
Ecuador en general siempre han tenido buenas autoras que, como en todo el mundo, fueron silenciadas e invisibilizadas porque el poder y la cultura estaban en manos de los hombres. Eso ya no lo pueden hacer hoy, aunque Dios sabe que lo intentan, porque el feminismo ha dinamitado los sótanos en los que nos tenían encerradas y ya es imposible no escucharnos.
6 Babelia, ‘María Fernanda Ampuero: Los grandes autores de Ecuador son mujeres’, El País, 30 July 2019 <https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/07/29/babelia/1564394 515_395159.html> [accessed 14 January 2020].The research presented in this book opens possibilities for relating the changes mentioned by Ampuero with the structural transformations in Ecuador triggered by the Feriado Bancario. A study of women’s writing after the crisis that takes into consideration its cultural consequences regarding gendered structures and the strengthening of transnational feminist networks is yet to be done. And the world as created by female Ecuadorian authors is yet to be identified and celebrated.
As illustrated by the case of women’s writing in Ecuador, the study of the cultural consequences prompted by an economic phenomenon is a fertile ground for enquiries into contemporary writing. This book has contended that a crisis can trigger the emergence of a new literature. Arguably, the 2020s started with the biggest crisis we have seen so far in the twenty-first century. Covid-19 had caused more than 5.8 million deaths barely two years after it was first identified by the World Health Organization as a pandemic in March 2020. Combined with the global connectivity of the present as embodied by the widespread use of social media, ‘never before have we been able to experience – and interact with – worldwide illness, death, suffering and globally spread fear
in real time’.
7 Luis A. Medina Cordova, ‘Microcuentos: Very Short Latin American Fiction in and for Pandemic Times’, Journal of World Literature, 7.1 (2022), pp. 39–53 (p. 41). New forms of World Literature enabled to circumvent editorial publishing processes by embracing the immediateness of social media, I have proposed elsewhere, must be considered in a context in which the time-consuming novel, the preferred object of study of literary enquiries concerned with the representation of the world, is unable to respond to worldwide events as they are happening. Ecuadorian authors, Ángela Arboleda (Guayaquil, 1969) among them, have been thoroughly involved in a process of literary experimentation to narrate Covid-19 with tools previously unavailable. The worlds created in their online coronavirus testimonies, pandemic
microcuentos, survival poetry and other emergent or re-emergent literary forms are there for us to explore not only how the crisis is and has been told, but also to enquire into how they locate the centre of a global experience in Ecuador and Latin America.
Since it provides a way to engage crises with cultural production in contemporary Latin America, this book’s framework could also be applied beyond Ecuador to other countries in the region that were facing crises long before the pandemic hit. Venezuela is one of the cases that comes to mind. Katie Brown has analysed the meanings of writing under the Bolivarian Revolution, covering Venezuelan literary production through most of Húgo Chávez’s time in power until his death in 2012.
8 Katie Brown, Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004–2012 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). In the last decade, however, Venezuela has experienced a notorious economic meltdown. Similar to the Ecuadorian case, one of the effects of this process is a previously unseen migration phenomenon: the International Organization for Migration estimates that the total number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide was to increase ‘from 4.5 million in October 2019 to 6.5 million in December 2020’.
9 Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela, ‘Refugee and Migrant Response Plan 2020’, International Organisation for Migration <https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/country/docs/venezuela/72254.pdf> [accessed 14 January 2020]. The fact that the majority of the displaced Venezuelans remain in Latin America is a catalyst for future research into world literary imagination. It presents us with an opportunity to look into cases of transnational interactions among minor countries. That is, a chance to explore the ways in which narrative reacts to the connections motivated by migrants navigating from one Latin American country to another. Their journeys south from Venezuela to countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia or Paraguay have the particularity of leaving Europe out of the picture. A study of the writing that emerges from this context of internal regional migration would be able to focus on a type of transnationalism that places its attention on literatures developing in countries located far from the so-called capitals of the global literary market. It would be ideally placed to advance the knowledge on how we imagine the world from spaces otherwise left unattended, just as this book has done with the Ecuadorian case.