Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that Roberto Bolaño’s theory of exile and nomad authorship develops the possibility for grounding a specific ethics in literary reading and writing. Rather than fall into the trap of a specified or singular logic of individuation, Bolaño suggests that artistic lines of flight from repressive identities—while limited by historical circumstance—are nonetheless possible through the imagining of the nomad as a transgressive subject and the historical condition of the exile as operators for the determination of community and individual subjectivity. Bolaño thus provides a way to negotiate the production of subjectivity with the dynamics of Latin American literature and artistic practice across the globe.
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Notes
- 1.
See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación racial” (2000), for a deeper understanding of the role that colonial power had over the topographical and epistemological life of Latin America.
- 2.
The term was coined by Rosi Braidotti in Nomadic Subjects (1994) to describe feminist subjects.
- 3.
In her introduction to Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (1994), editor Angelika Bammer argues that “the separation of people from their native culture through physical dislocation is one of the most formative experiences of this century” (xi).
- 4.
There has been significant work on the issue of Latin American exile and diaspora. Please see Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger’s The Politics of Exile in Latin America (2009), for an excellent transnational history that gives a detailed analysis of the political history of exile in the region.
- 5.
This quote is located in an unsourced quotation in Edward Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile” in Reflections on Exile (2000).
- 6.
While the United Nations Refugee Agency maintains a division between migrants, refugees, and exiles, it nonetheless addresses the legal and political ambiguity of the status of refugees in their recent report on the issue globally: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner, The State of the World’s Refugees: Human Displacement in the New Millennium (2006).
- 7.
Kaminsky, p. 109.
- 8.
This refers to a pendant piece of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus that is published under the title Nomadology: The War Machine (1986).
- 9.
Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (1993).
- 10.
As Deleuze writes in Pure Immanence: A Life: “Immanence and a life thus suppose one another. For immanence is pure only when it is not immanent to a prior subject or object, mind of matter, only when, neither innate nor acquired, it is always yet ‘in the making’; and ‘a life’ is a potential or virtuality subsisting in just such a purely immanent plane” (13). Thus we can see how the virtuality of the immanent is the inability to close around the distinct identity of a singular or specified plane, but the constant recirculation of the ungovernable contours of an inclusive, specific plane.
- 11.
See Pascale Casanova’s seminal text The World Republic of Letters (2004), for a thorough analysis of the commercial and cultural flows of literature as a center-periphery model.
- 12.
Osvaldo Zavala is arguably one of the more astute critics of Bolaño, despite his focus on literary genealogy. Notwithstanding, for a developed idea of Bolaño’s Entre paréntesis as both political text and sophisticated work of literary historiography, please read Zavala’s “El ensayo Entre paréntesis: Roberto Bolaño y el olvido de la modernidad latinoamerican” (2012).
References
Bammer, Angelika, ed. Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. The State of The World’s Refugees: Human Displacement in the New Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Shumway, Nicolas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1993. Print.
Sznajder, Mario, and Luis Roniger. The Politics of Exile in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.
Zavala, Osvaldo. “El Ensayo Entre Paréntesis: Roberto Bolaño Y El Olvido De La Modernidad Latinoamericana.” Revista Iberoamericana LXXVIII.240 (2012): 637–56. Print.
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Amador, C.M. (2016). Roberto Bolaño’s Specific Exiles. In: Ethics and Literature in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, 1970-2000. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_6
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