Visiones y Re-visiones: el Espacio de la Nación en la Narrativa Uruguaya del Retorno a la Democracia

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze the textual strategies that enable literature to explore a multiplicity of "other nations" emerged after the fragmentation of Anderson's "imagined community". My analysis is focused on spatial images in some novels published in Uruguay in the post-dictatorship period (1985 to the present). These post-dictatorial re-visions are based on the demolition of the old homogenous and essentialist conceptions of the nation, and their aim is to foster a permanent dialogue of complementary/opposite community models, rather than establish themselves as the official one.

I study the novels La casa de enfrente (1988) by Alicia Migdal, Perfumes de Cartago (1994) by Teresa Porzecanski and Cañas de la India (1995) by Hugo Achugar to show how the traditional ideas about the nation, identity, memory, and history are re-written from a feminist/feminine point of view. These texts emphasize the political significance of the space of the house, and the deletion of borders between the private and public spheres, as well as between the local and the global.

In the novels Trampa para ángeles de barro (1992) by Renzo Rosselló, Estokolmo (1998) by Gustavo Escanlar and Caras extrañas (2002) by Rafael Courtoisie, I argue that the choice of narrative genre implies a sordid image of the community. Moreover, the geographical trajectories of the characters convey a rhetoric that fragments the urban map, and develops ghettos.

Finally, in El camino a Ítaca (1994) by Carlos Liscano (1949), Un amor en Bangkok (1994) by Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (1947) and Cielo de Bagdad (2001) by Tomás de Mattos (1947) I explore how a new national imaginary is restructured in the light of transnational migrations and the internationalization of symbolic markets. To that end, the novels resort to the literary tradition through inter-textuality, re-signifying the power of literature to interpret the new identity realities and "dream" of alternative world models, thus creating a post-modern "utopia".