Mapping the interstices: intertextuality, language, and authorial voice in Zapatista poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the Zapatista use of the Word as weapon and as world-making. In particular, we focus on narrative devices and discursive strategies that reveal the locus of enunciation from which the Zapatistas, via Marcos, speak. This Word emerges from, and is situated at, the interstices of Western and Mayan worlds. In the Zapatista stories this is evident through a transmodern use of intertextuality; the critique of “false language” and the eruption of an-other grammar; and a dynamic authorial performance that shifts between Marcos-el Sup as narrator vis-à-vis Marcos as author, spokesperson, and Subcomandante of the EZLN.