Liberian Signifiers and the Crisis of Latin American Cosmopolitan Imaginaries

Abstract

Over the last decade, scholars of Latin American studies have made significant efforts to think of Latin American culture beyond its borders (and beyond its well-known exchanges with Western Europe and the United States). This has led to projects that explored the region's material connections with Africa, from the history of the Atlantic slave trade to concrete cultural collaborations read through critical frameworks provided by the disciplinary discourses of postcolonial and Global South studies, among other research paths. But what happens when the Latin American literary imagination of Africa lies outside self-evident historical links? How do we read those rare moments when Latin American literary discourse engages a certain Africa with which it has no material, institutional, or significant historical relations? Say, for example, Liberia. This essay looks at the traces of the Liberian signifier in a series of novels and travelogues (Los detectives salvajes by Roberto Bolaño, Una Luna by Martín Caparrós, and Fiesta en la madriguera by Juan Pablo Villalobos) in order to examine how Latin American literature worked through a number of possible relations with its global others and examined the crisis of its cosmopolitan traditions and its place in the world at the turn of the twenty-first century.