Against civilization and barbarism: border spaces and bodies in El año del desierto by Pedro Mairal and Las aventuras de la China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Abstract

This article aims to interpret and compare border features of two Argentine novels after the 2001 crisis that works with representations of civilization and barbarism discourse. To do this, inspired by Lefebvre's ideas on spatiality (1974) combined with the semiotics of Lotman's artistic text (1975), a methodological matrix is proposed in order to conceptualize what is perceived, thought and lived in the stories.

At the diegetic level, this is observed in the articulation of a spatio-temporal design and the trajectories of the narrative agents. These categories will allow us to describe the forms of borderity (Amilhat and Giraud, 2011) in the artworks, that is, the narrative representation of a spatial dialectic between devices of symbolic-territorial power and the bodies that dynamize them.

In this way it will be observed that, on the one hand, the modeling forces of the narrative worlds articulate a dominant duality around the opposition between civilization and barbarism, which will then see a possible way out. In the narrations, the antagonism of represented spaces will be revealed as contradictory and fallacious at the light of alterity, installing a deconstructive gaze on them. Complementarily, the bodies of the narrative subjects are in constant movement through the territories, living experiences that will lead them to detachment from imposed binary constructions, opting for other logics of coexistence.

In this sense, these works present features of a decolonial episteme that Mignolo (2003, 2014) calls border thinking, which raises challenges to local and global hegemonies to unravel and discuss the intersections of patriarchal and colonial capitalism.