Between subalternity and trickery: the figuration of Latin America and American labor in Héctor Libertella's Nueva Escritura en Latinoamérica

Abstract

Reflection on the object «America» has existed since the Conquest, and has been changing through different redefinitions. First, as a necessity of the European conscience and, later, as an imperative of the American conscience itself, the idea of America has also been approached from different angles, becoming an object of dispute at the geographical and historical level, and in hemispheric relations between the juridical‒political and cultural. If each definition is a battle for meaning, and each idea of America opens an imaginary, understood as a symbolic construction with geopolitical meaning, the following paper aims to map what figure of Latin America can be read in the critical‒literary work of Héctor Libertella in his Nueva Escritura en Latinoamérica. Through the critical apparatus Libertella assembles and the authors he chooses for his counter-canon to the Latin American boom, Libertella sketches a Latin America that has less to do with its themes than with a mode of production: the Latin American would be, in this perspective, an operation that recognizes a mass of historical signs —intertwined in links of colonialism and subalternity— and swallows them through a work that exhibits them in their uncertainties and denaturalizes them, corroding them.