El discurso latinoamericano del exilio: extraterritorialidad y novela en Argentina y Cuba desde los años setenta

This dissertation addresses the relationship between narrative and extraterritoriality in Argentine and Cuban novels from the 1970s through the present, from a perspective that stresses the role of political exile in the configuration and revision of the dynamics of national and Latin American imaginaries and literary histories, and the formation of a Latin American exile discourse. The analysis opens with the discussion of the naturalization of extraterritoriality as the normal locus of enunciation for Latin American narrative, in an ideological construct that works to localize politics and esthetics. Against this normalization, some exile novels -which are not necessarily defined in terms of space in relation to politics- impose their political impact over the materiality of location, some introduce and develop the notion that territorial dispersion of a national population accounts for the dispersion of the nation itself, and some others reevaluate exile thematically in an effort to offer a revised version of the nation and of national literary history. The dissertation focuses on the narrative analysis of this process in a corpus of novels that allow thinking of exile as a defining feature of the national experience, a major trait of Latin American culture, and a discursive formation that will continue to be relevant in the renovation of the very idea of Latin America. The questions that articulate this comparative approach -which lays claim to an embracing regional representativity- are: how do exiled writers inscribe their production in national literary history once the intellectual field in their countries has gone through a process of fracture?; how do they conceive of political intervention in a space that has excluded them?; can these texts be approached from Jameson's standpoint of third world narrative as national allegory?; can a tradition of exile help in solving new occurrences of dislocation in the national context