This paper seeks to analyse displacement as a political form of production and reading of contemporary literature. We begin with the works of Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia, and we then move forward to other narratives produced within the Latin American continent in the past decades. According to Piglia, displacement means “to go towards the other, to make the other tell the truth about what [he] feels or what has happened — this displacement, this change works as an experience condenser”. Piglia adds that displacement entails the inclusion of the other in the narrative: allowing this other to speak — an other that speaks also about the narrating subject; and finding in the other something that identifies oneself, something that is common between them. By seeing the ethical and political responsibilities of literature — and of the arts, we could add — from this perspective, displacement would be the way by which literary texts oppose established power discourses in terms of both production (the writing process) and circulation. Such challenging of political and cultural domination is always voiced from the borders of the developed world, making the in-between its space of circulation. This condition would be fundamental to the establishment and sharing of the experience, since it is only in the relationships between subjects that experience can arise. Besides Piglia’s texts, we also look into the works of Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll and of Bolivian author Edmundo Paz Soldán.
About the presenterRafaela Scardino
Rafaela Scardino is a doctoral student at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil, where she is writing a dissertation on contemporary literature in Latin America. She is the author of Movimentos de demolição: deslocamentos, identidades e literatura (2011) and editor of A crítica literária: percursos, métodos, exercícios (2009) and Traços de um outro mapa: literatura contemporânea nas Américas(2013). She will be at New York University for the fall semester as an International Graduate Researcher Visiting Scholar.