The Politics of Literary Cartography
Santiago Gamboa’s Global Urban Cartography: Escaping the Colombian Border
In the field of Latin American Literature, the nation has traditionally functioned as both anchor and inspiration for fiction. Committed to defining and affirming their cultural particularism against either the former colonial centers in Europe or the cultural hegemony of the United States to the North, writers have circumscribed their imagination within a series of geopolitical lines as the very means to secure their existence within the space of literature. Symbolic capital within the World Republic of Letters—to borrow Pascale Casanova’s formulation—was predicated on articulating their own position within the periphery. Among Colombian writers, this ordering of the world has been particularly prevalent after the critical and commercial success of Gabriel Garcia Marquez when his mythical Macondo became an obligatory and almost universal cultural reference.
This paper explores how Santiago Gamboa’s novels, in refusing to anchor its plots and characters in Colombia, escape the confines of the national and chart a new literary cartography. By describing a global urban landscape that straddles several continents, connects the Global South with the Global North, and challenges the limits of the nation, Gamboa exits the literary periphery and enters a larger world space of literature.
