Dislocated Subjects in the Global City: Santiago Gamboa’s Hotel Pekín

Abstract

Hotel Pekín’s Frank Michalski is a traveler through the spaces constructed by globalization: hotels, airports, high-rise corporate offices: all non-places in a global city. This global city in the novel is Beijing, where Frank travels on business to help top executives in the emerging economy adopt a western way of life. Michalski gives up his nationality to enter the global corporate order but his sojourn to Beijing, his wanderings in this locality and the characters that he meets there, makes him question his life and his work as a purveyor of globality. Malagón analyzes this tension between global and local and proposes that Hotel Pekín questions the constitutive imaginary of the nation in particular, and Latin America as a whole, in a narrative that addresses the opposition between the global and the local, inscribing the discussion in a space that is not traditionally that of Latin American narrative.