Worldly Conjunctions and Disjunctions: On Cosmopolitanism and Nomadism in Diamela Eltit's "Por La Patria" (1986) and el Padre Mío (1989)

Abstract

The term cosmopolitan has a long and complex history. Although the contemporary r??valua? tion o? cosmopolitan is closely linked to the sociopolitical and cultural mappings of postcolonial subjects, it has not focused specifically on the Latin American context. The present essay provides an outline of recent conversations on this willfully provocative term, in order to translate their possibilities for the present examination of late avant-garde writing produced during General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile (Robbins, Secular 182). As novelist, performance artist, and one of the founding members of the grupo Avanzada, a counterinstitutional art movement that emerged in 1977 and disbanded in 1983, Diamela Eltit (b.1949) is a key and, again, highly complex figure (Richard, Destrucci?n 85). The attention given to intellectuals' self-fashioning in current discussions of cosmopolitanism make this topic especially useful for deciphering authorial/intellectual positioning in Eltit's narratives, published during a dictatorship (1973-90) that executed approximately three thousand people and tortured or forced into exile tens of thousands more. Drawing mainly on the ideas of James Clifford and Bruce Robbins, I see cosmopolitanism as an umbrella concept that can capture not only the ethics of the intersubjective experience involved in reading Eltit's Por la patria (1986) and El padre m?o (1989), but also the politics of those works' reception both nationally and internationally. My assessment of various other critical approaches is central to engaging degrees of complicity with objects of study and the correspon? ding hierarchies authors and critics establish to codify art's transgressive dimensions. This secon? dary material highlights the difficulties of critiquing art produced in, as Mary Louise Pratt so accurately states, a culture of fear. The testimonial El padre mio1 begs for laudatory appraisals