Narrative Unmoored: Photography, Orientalism, and Geopolitics in Roberto Arlt's “La cadena del ancla”

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of “La cadena del ancla,” a short story that Roberto Arlt wrote as a journalist while on assignment in Morocco during the mid-1930s, from the perspective of postcolonial studies and visual culture. While focusing on the themes of espionage and revenge, it analyzes Orientalist storytelling as a praxis of writing alongside history, through which the Argentine writer documented the rivalry between global colonial powers in 1935. By examining the main characters’ displacement along the coast of North Africa, from Tangier to Cairo, the essay aims to open up the lines of interconnectivity between photography and narrative, visual arts and Mediterranean geopolitical flows. Arlt engages a “repertoire of Orientalism” by interpolating what Graham Huggan has called the “postcolonial exotic,” but he also subverts it by inviting history into the pages of his short story. When read with a postcolonial understanding of the writer's travels, Arlt's visual projection of his experiences in Spain and Morocco makes us better understand how they became an integral part of his more explicitly politicized future writing, especially his plays África (1938) and La fiesta del hierro (1940).