Speaker
Description
Since the mid 20th century, Latin American literature has been continuously associated with baroque novelistic forms, while other genres such as travel writing are oftentimes ignored. However, during the aesthetico-political project of the 1960s Boom, Latin American authors not only developed an internationalist political consciousness, but also actively engaged with geographies outside of the Americas and Europe in moments of conflict. The contemporary Latin American intellectual thus became a cultural and political mediator between distant geographies and a generalized Latin America readership, capable of challenging othering media discourses and providing alternative narratives of crisis.
This paper explores the travel narratives of two Latin American novelists set in the Islamic world during periods of political turmoil and war. It analyzes Mario Vargas Llosa’s Diario de Irak (2003), written after the U.S. invasion, and Santiago Gamboa’s Océanos de arena (2013), composed two years into the Syrian civil war. I argue that these chronicles not only portray the complexities of geopolitical crises in Iraq and Syria to a Latin American audience, but also humanize victims of violence who are oftentimes reduced to anonymous casualties by the Western media. By depicting the culture and physicality of cities in both Iraq and Syria, these authors center on the rich historical, literary, artistic and religious heritage of two regions caught in periods of political violence, reframing them as spaces of cultural depth rather than mere sites of destruction.
More broadly, this paper considers how politically conscious Latin American novelists respond to crises beyond their own region, and the role of literature in mediating transnational solidarities. In doing so, these chronicles not only reframe Iraq and Syria beyond the prism of war, but also reveal how Latin American literature can intervene in global crises as a mode of cultural translation and comprehension.
| Keywords | Latin America, Islamic world, travel writing, transnational solidarity, global crisis |
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| mpadroncuret@gmail.com |