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E-book Belonging Beyond Borders : Cosmopolitan Affiliations in Contemporary Spanish American Literature
“El Perú soy yo aunque a algunos no les guste” (“I am Peru even if some do not like it”1), claimed Mario Vargas Llosa after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. And indeed, even if it is a great hon-our for any nation to have one of its citizens receive such a prestigious distinction, many Peruvians questioned the Nobel Foundation’s decision. Vargas Llosa was not—at least in his detractors’ eyes—Peruvian enough to be celebrated for an award that news outlets often report with an emphasis on the recipient’s nationality. Since he moved to Spain in the 1990s, Vargas Llosa has been seen as removed from his birth nation. There were even multiple calls for the revocation of his Peruvian citizenship, some of them made by the government itself. If we replace Perú with México in the above quotation, the criticism levelled at Vargas Llosa could also apply to Elena Poniatowska and Jorge Volpi, the two other writers I analyze in this book. Poniatowska is, and has been for the past forty years or so, a staple of contemporary Mexican nar-rative. While no one called for the revocation of her citizenship when she was awarded the Premio Cervantes—the highest recognition in Hispanic literature—in 2013, as a young female author in 1960s and ’70s Mexico, her aristocratic background and her harsh criticism of the Mexican gov-ernment after the Tlatelolco massacre made her an outcast in national(ist) literary circles. Volpi, like Vargas Llosa, has faced calls for his citizenship to be revoked—in his case, after the publication En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor; 1999), his first work to gain international acclaim. The book’s major flaws in Mexican literary critics’ eyes? The protagonist is not Mexican, and the plot is not set in Mexico. These anecdotes highlight how closely the conceptions of litera-ture and national identity are intertwined in Latin America. The three novelists I study in Belonging Beyond Borders: Cosmopolitan Affiliations in Contemporary Spanish American Literature are acutely aware of their delicate positioning in the literary tradition. They are cosmopolitans with strong ties to their home nations, positions many critics consider irrecon-cilable. In spite of this, Vargas Llosa, Poniatowska, and Volpi embraced the tensions engendered by their bodies of work and political positions, and exploited them to serve their intellectual agendas, which promote con-tacts between cultures through rooted cosmopolitanism. One of the main concerns of Belonging Beyond Borders is reconceptualizing cosmopolitan-ism in order to consider the specific characteristics of Latin America’s socio-historical and geopolitical contexts. It traces the shift from the rejection of cosmopolitanism to its emplotment by three contemporary Spanish American authors, and the ways this is reflected in five of their novels. I am particularly interested in how these narratives showcase char-acters who aspire to be cosmopolitan. The struggle they face in complex political environments and the way they strive to embody rooted cosmo-politanism can provide a template for contemporary readers.
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