Postnational Masculinities and Globalization in Junot Díaz and Juan Francisco Ferré

Vivancos-Pérez’s chapter demonstrates how the postnational position is influencing discourses on gender. By comparing Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her (2012) with Spanish writer Juan Francisco Ferré’s Providence (2009) and Karnaval (2012), he argues that both authors display a critique of masculinity as an essential component of a postnational approach to cultural exchange. While Ferré disidentifies with narrative strategies of the fiction of displacement in Hispanic literatures, Díaz’s particular “low theory” emphasizes diasporicity. At the same time, this chapter draws a useful parallel between Díaz’s and Ferré’s explorations of masculinity, which add a new dimension to the transnational turn in Latino/Hispanic studies. Both authors do not simply reject traditional hypermasculine myths but try to explore their specificity within a greater transnational/global context, either by focusing on transculturation, colonial legacies, displacement and marginalization, or by elucidating the dynamic and elusive relationships among global capitalism, identity, and media spectacle.

Beyond Borders

Silvia Goldman presents the Chilean poet and performer Cecilia Vicuña’s poetry collection i tu (2004) as a postnational work of literature that addresses its reader in several languages, such as Spanish, English, and Quechua. Goldman argues that i tu establishes a speech “between languages,” able to pierce through territorial, cultural, and linguistic borders. The poetic voice calls this an “habla-alba” (a “dawn-speech”) that identifies the common roots of several languages and thus re-establishes the connections between them. By challenging pre-established linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries, Vicuña's poetry aims to construct a future based on the continual redefinition of a multilingual and multicultural identity.The poems ini tu, therefore, can be read as an itinerant geography within a provisional country, described by the poetic voice as a “no lugar.” Protected from exile and rootlessness, an alternative sense of belonging can be constructed. The collection i tu, as this chapter argues, builds its own utopian, alternative “global village,” where the threads that lead back to a common point of origin are made visible and where political, national, cultural, and linguistic borders are questioned.

The Classical Tradition of Cosmopolitan “Spiritual Exercises” in Jorge Luis Borges and Latin American Postnational Literature

Castany Prado’s chapter offers a fuller understanding of Borges’s cosmopolitanism, which has been influential in contemporary Western literature in general, and, more specifically, in postnational Latin American literature. The author traces the roots of cosmopolitanism back to the teachings of the Cynics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Neo-Platonists, before identifying their literary projections in contemporary Hispanic literature. He then argues that the postnational paradigm is neither the direct result of recent globalization processes, nor can it be understood in solely internationalist terms; rather, it is heir to a millennia-long tradition of philosophical cosmopolitanism. This is especially important in the area of postnational Latin American literature, for which, according to Castany Prado, Borges constitutes a decisive influence.

Voluntary Exiles, New Identities, and the Emergence of a Postnational Sensibility in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Brignole explores the question of postnational identity by proposing a reading of three novels that signal a transition point in the literature of exile and displacement in Latin America. The characters portrayed in El síndrome de Ulises (2005) by Santiago Gamboa, Travesuras de la niña mala(2006) by Mario Vargas Llosa, and El exilio voluntario (2009) by Claudio Ferrufino-Coqueugniot are the fictional counterparts of a new generation of voluntary exiles that has started to replace, in diachronic progression, the traditional figures of leftist revolutionaries and political exiles. The typical voluntary exile is not fixated on an attempt to recover a lost identity, like the traditional exile, nor does he attempt to assimilate into the cultural make-up of the new countries he inhabits, like the immigrant. Instead, he remains in an indefinite state of “foreignness” by adopting an interstitial position, located somewhere between those of the exile and the immigrant. Instead of assigning unwarranted importance to a nation, an ideology, or a race, the protagonists of these novels project a new postnational sensibility. They emphasize the shared experience of all exiles, draw attention to the futility of borders, and forge productive fraternal bonds with individuals coming from different cultural heritages.

Introduction

The introduction addresses recent changes in the field of Hispanic studies, specifically, how expanding worldviews at different moments in time have impacted the way Latin American, Latino, or Spanish authors write, how they are read today, and how postnational perspectives are reshaping literatures and cultural theory in the “Global Now.” In light of diverging semantic interpretations within and beyond the discipline, the introduction frames postnational perspectives as those that identify the interrelations between the local and the global, while recognizing the continuing ties to the nation. After providing a brief historical perspective on cosmopolitanism and the much-contested idea of world literature, the editors provide a basic explanation on how terms such as Hispanic, postnational, cosmopolitan, etc., are understood and applied within the chapters of this volume, all of which, as they argue, point to the construction and exploration of new hermeneutic horizons within the field of Hispanic studies, as a consequence of globalization.

The Postnational Reception of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento

Since the 1980s, the Spanish novel has become a constant presence in the international literary arena. This chapter deals with the degree in which contemporary Spanish literature tends to be received in a postnational frame of reference. The author focuses on the international reception of La sombra del viento (2001), Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s towering bestseller. The plot stands out for its strong heteronomous context—Barcelona before and after the Spanish Civil War—which makes Ruiz Zafón’s novel an interesting case study to test the postnational status of contemporary Spanish literature. The chapter focuses on four countries that hold an important or even central position in the world republic of letters: Germany, France, the U.S., and England.

Cosmopolitan Postnationalists

Fernández de Alba’s chapter presents a synthesis of cosmopolitanism and nationalism by examining the works of Virgilio Piñera and Wifredo Lam, two cosmopolitans sui generis, who participated in the construction of a national Cuban culture. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are often presented either as an absolute form of universality or as an uncompromising localism, when, in reality, both terms are dynamic cultural categories. In defiance of a homogeneous view of Cuban culture that accentuated the Creole experience of the late colonial period, Piñera and Lam fought against the establishment of a national identity that would elevate a single racial and ethnic heritage over all others. In doing so, the author argues, both writers contributed to a cosmopolitan view on national identity, one based on a wider sense of cultural citizenship. Furthermore, they devoted themselves to creating a national culture that could be cosmopolitan in form while fundamentally rooted in Cuban society and history.

ImagiNations from a History of Space to a History of Movement

This chapter provides a postnational perspective on Cuban history, culture, and its literature, from the moment of its invention until the Castro era. Many of our theories and epistemologies are informed by spatial and static views that keep us from recognizing the highly dynamic developments and processes at their base. As an alternative, Ette appeals to a transition from history informed by spatiality to a history shaped by movement. By examining the first examples of early modern cartography, Ette argues that Cuba had been perceived from the moment of discovery as a potential global island. Furthermore, the author cites prime examples of Cuban literature, among them the works of José Martí, that follow a logic of inclusion, not one of exclusion, based on a theory of global relationality. Given the fact that Cuban literature has been written on all continents—mostly in Spanish, but also on a translingual level in the respective languages of the countries of exile—the idea of Cuba as a global island could become part of a trans-areal archipelago, one built upon the foundation of symmetrical relations that develop a relational logic in accordance with the ongoing process of globalization.

Space, Subjectivity, and Literary Studies in the Age of Globalization

Taking as a premise the view that the present is a transitional period toward what seems to be a new epoch, this chapter argues that discussions on literary studies vis-à-vis globalization ought to reflect on the new production of space that started in the 1980s and is now expanding throughout the globe. The processes of globalization go hand in hand with a new experience of space and with the formation of new subjectivities. These and related phenomena make it difficult, if not impossible, to approach national literary traditions as discrete objects of study. Santiáñez’s chapter contends that, in the same way that many individuals live the world transnationally, Hispanism needs to be practiced as if works and authors were nodes located in a space of flows that both includes and transcends the nation. While globalization has—so far—not brought about the end of the nation-state, it has redefined it. This redefinition—which in fact describes the new function as well as the loss of sovereignty of the nation-state in the age of globalization—requires from teachers and researchers trained to work on national literatures an in-depth, radical reassessment of their activities.

A Postnational Critique of Language

This chapter argues that the Spanish language, including its literatures and cultures, is inherently postnational. For this reason, critical approaches based on transatlantic exchanges may unlock the creative potential of Hispanism’s multilingualism. These transatlantic dialogues aim to reconfigure the spatial organization of the world through a postnational language that reflects a paradigm of mixture (more so than mestizaje) and offers a cultural model based on heterogeneity. By citing examples of authors and literary works from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century written on both sides of the Atlantic, Ortega reminds us that the Spanish language and its literatures are not only the product of a melting pot of Iberian regionalisms (Galician, Basque, Catalan) but also of the indigenous languages of the Americas. In light of the challenges of globalization and a globalized market, this cultural territory establishes itself as a potential promise of compatibility and a new kind of modernity.