Space, Quarantine and Disease. A Geocritical Reading of La transmigración de los cuerpos, by Yuri Herrera

A Geocritical Reading of La transmigración de los cuerpos, by Yuri Herrera

Abstract

In Yuri Herrera's La transmigración de los cuerpos, a pandemic confines city dwellers. The protagonist is forced to manage the exchange of two corpses in the middle of the quarantine. The character's journey shows a heterogeneous and dynamic space. This paper aims to give an interpretation to the transfer between smooth and striated spaces, the inside and the outside, the private and the public in the novel. The dynamic that is established between these conceptions highlights two fundamental aspects: a discipline for the sake of a subjectivation that is based on the modeling of docile bodies and the predominance of some state of emergency conditions, manifested in authoritarian control. From a geocritical perspective, the conflictive relationships between the discourse of a hegemonic center, which tends to homogenize, and one of the peripheries located around the latter are analyzed.