By Nina Podleszańska
Katedra Literatur Francuskiego Obszaru Językowego
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Poland
A writer, profesor, and translator, Podleszańska explores how literature shapes our inner lives and social awareness. Their work focuses on the political dimensions of contemporary Spanish-language writing and the lasting impact of what we read. Fascinated by stories that entertain while quietly transforming us, they research engaged literature, popular genres, and the sociology of literature. Their favorite contemporary Spanish writers include Belén Gopegui, Roberto Bolaño, and Jorge Majfud.
In The Transnational Dimension of Criticism in the Narrative of Jorge Majfud, Nina Podleszańska offers a sustained critical reading of Majfud’s fiction as a form of engaged literature that crosses national, cultural, and generic boundaries. The study argues that Majfud’s work is best understood from a supranational perspective: his narratives articulate a global critique of power, capitalism, nationalism, and systemic violence while foregrounding the lived experiences of migrants and social outcasts.
Podleszańska situates Majfud as a transatlantic intellectual whose writing emerges from movement between Latin America, Europe, and the United States. This positionality allows him to expose the erosion of traditional patriotism and the fragility of modern identities shaped by displacement. Through close readings of novels such as La reina de América, El mar estaba sereno, La ciudad de la luna, and Crisis, the author demonstrates how Majfud repeatedly dismantles nationalist myths, revealing instead hybrid genealogies, fractured memories, and the precarious realities of contemporary migration.
A central theme of the book is Majfud’s representation of violence in its multiple forms: overt political repression in Latin America, the objective violence embedded in global capitalism, and the subtle cruelty of social exclusion. Podleszańska shows how Majfud’s characters—prostitutes, political prisoners, undocumented workers, abandoned children, and traumatized veterans—embody the human cost of these systems. Migration, once associated with hope and opportunity, appears instead as a condition of instability that often leads to the flattening or erasure of identity.
The study shows how Majfud employs diverse narrative strategies—fragmentation, repetition, irony, allegory, and the blending of journalism with fiction—to convey what Podleszańska calls a “situated ethical consciousness.” His writing does not merely represent suffering; it insists on thinking through it. Even when his novels verge on polemic, Majfud avoids simplistic propaganda by grounding political critique in personal stories and existential conflict. His protagonists tend to be dissident figures whose resistance arises less from organized activism than from an instinctive rejection of cruelty and injustice.
Particular attention is paid to Crisis, where Majfud depicts Latino migrants in the United States as both economically necessary and socially disposable. By giving many characters the same generic names, he underscores their anonymity within the machinery of capitalism, while simultaneously restoring dignity to their experiences through narrative voice. Podleszańska argues that this technique produces an “anti-epic” effect that mirrors the dehumanizing logic of globalization itself.
This book presents Majfud as a writer committed to a progressive humanist tradition. His literature functions as a space for critical reflection, where emotion and ideas coexist, and where storytelling becomes a tool for exposing hidden structures of domination. Podleszańska concludes that Majfud’s work exemplifies a contemporary form of engaged writing—one that transcends borders, challenges collective amnesia, and invites readers to reconsider freedom, belonging, and responsibility in an interconnected world.
The writings of Uruguayan author Jorge Majfud (Tacuarembó, 1969) firmly establish his position as a dissident and critic of the global political-economic system. Committing to this sphere outside literature always leads a writer to rethink the relationships between literature, politics, and society, as well as to renew poetics, that is, the specific ways available to accommodate critical intent. This is certainly heightened in the context of supranational crises (Denis 5; López Terra 126-53). Majfud effectively addresses a profusion of sociopolitical issues on the one hand, and on the other, reflects on the impact of culture and literature. A striking feature of his writing is the intense circulation of the same ideas and criticism as polemical necessity that makes use of all the genres at hand.
Freedom is a utopia in all its known forms. Wait a minute. No, I am not arguing in favor of the Castro regime when I laugh myself silly listening to talk of “the freedom of capitalism” that true capitalists (I mean, those who have the capital to buy the necessary freedom, those who can lobby Congress, not humble professors like us) never believed in. (Majfud, Crisis 24)
Statements like this abound in both Majfud’s fictional prose and his articles. As a result, the authorial alter ego of the fictions and the empirical subject who signs the non-literary contributions acquire the same power of conviction. Controversial literature deliberately saturated with sociopolitical themes often arouses suspicion and accusations of propaganda. However, one may wonder why literature should not also serve to argue with imaginary or real opponents. Moreover, one can affirm, with Terry Eagleton, that “there is nothing wrong with propaganda as long as it is done well […]” and that not necessarily “all committed works must be strident and reductionist” (99-100). As for Majfud, there is no doubt that he knows how to avoid pitfalls such as wooden characters or ideological harangues. His protagonists adopt critical or dissident positions not because they unhesitatingly choose the path of political action, but because they are rare birds whose existentialist temperament leads them to rebel against violence, whether overt or covert. Reflection on current events in Majfud’s work also fits into a broader framework, that of his anthropological vision of civilization: a series of stages in the struggle for human emancipation. In this process, committed literature is what preserves the critical tradition of progressive humanism under the banner of freedom. In short, Majfud’s varied texts reveal the silhouette of a discursive subject for whom writing, whether fictional or factual, serves first and foremost as a means of thinking and expressing opinions, above and beyond generic boundaries.
The following text will analyze, specifically, the supranational character of Majfud’s criticism in four novels: La reina de América, La ciudad de la luna, Crisis, El mar estaba sereno, with specific reference to his articles. All of them raise and discuss issues of both Latin American and global significance: the transformations in the sense of identity of migrants between Europe and the Americas, the precariousness of their fate, political violence in Latin America, and the objective (systemic) violence of global capitalism.
It is precisely this global perspective—“beyond the nation”—that best characterizes his writing. Majfud, born in Uruguay, currently resides in the United States, but also publishes with Spanish publishers and newspapers. His work reflects the perspective of the “Atlantic subject,” that is, a “subject who moves between roles and borders, capable of subverting even the referential frameworks of politics” (Ortega 115, 111), endowed with “a critical view of his environment and the transatlantic horizon.” (Aínsa, “Nueva” 122). The (anti)hero of 21st-century Spanish-American literature is delocalized, affected by transterritoriality. On the one hand, he tends to question, spontaneously or reflectively, the traditional meaning of patriotism, and on the other, to take into consideration the supranational conditioning of the human condition.
American clichés. The erosion of patriotism and the migrant condition
For Latin Americans in the 19th and until the mid-20th century, “having an identity was equivalent to being part of a nation or having a ‘great homeland,’” that is, a continental one (García Canclini 39). In late capitalist societies, however, we observe the “loss of the traditional telluric-biological references of identity and the collapse of the meta-concept that unified it around the notions of territory, people, nation, country, community, roots” (Aínsa, “Nueva” 111). Today, “spiritual geography” (Aínsa, Del canon 17-20) can be constituted with equal success in the media and virtual environment, fostering new forms of identity association, for example, what Appadurai calls “virtual neighborhoods” (203) or “communities of feeling” (23). But in the heat of these processes, traditional nationalist ideology comes into stark contrast with the perception of identity as hybrid and cross-border.
Noting these changes, which are ultimately also changes in individual and collective mentality, Majfud narrates the ups and downs of the lives of transatlantic and inter-American migrants. In general, his tactic consists of pointing out, in the same novel, similar socio-political problems affecting human groups in different parts of the world. This allows him to shift or, if you will, glocalize the theme of capitalist hegemony, wars, migrations with their corollary of suffering, and exploitation on a planetary scale.
One of the central problems in La reina de América and El mar estaba sereno is the clash between the stale ideological and patriotic messages rooted in Latin American tradition and the personal experiences of the protagonists, transatlantic migrants.
The young Spanish woman Mabel embarks on a journey to Uruguay accompanying her aristocratic father, who is fleeing ruin. Even before her departure, Mabel’s mother senses failure: “Perhaps you think you will make your fortune in America and return as a queen […]. Well, I’ll tell you that you’re wrong, you ill-tempered girl. In America, you will only be unhappy. You will go to bed in pain and you will wake up in pain.” (La reina 34). Indeed, Mabel’s life belies the old myth of American prosperity. During the boat trip, she falls madly in love with the handsome Scandinavian Jacobsen, who swears eternal love to her, gets her pregnant, and disappears when the boat arrives in Uruguay. But love, an idealized memory, will continue to feed the imagination of both. Marginalized and without resources, Mabel becomes a prostitute to support herself and her daughter Consuelo. However, for her Spanish family, Mabel becomes an American “queen,” “because that was the only image they had of the Río de la Plata, thanks to a postcard my mother sent to my grandmother. […] Nor could they imagine that in a country where everyone made money, someone from their family, well-educated and of good European stock, did not have everything” (La reina 36).
Jacobsen embodies another form of failure, this time determined by political circumstances (the exacerbation of the confrontation between the left and the right in the Southern Cone). Mabel’s fleeting lover and Consuelo’s father, Jacobsen becomes involved in anti-state clandestine activities in Argentina and is persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured. When the military interrogate him in his own home, fragments of official, patriotic, and xenophobic speeches are woven into the scene: “We will cleanse this country of rats, especially those rats who, like you, came down from the holds of ships. And we will continue to fulfill our patriotic duty, , sending to hell those who seek to destroy the freedom of our nation” (La reina 29). An officer provokes him by insisting on calling Kierkegaard “Russian”: “He has read with difficulty. He doesn’t understand and gets annoyed. He throws the book on the desk and declares: it’s Russian, soldier, some of that shit the Bolsheviks read. It’s Danish,” says Jacobsen. “It’s Russian,” orders the colonel. “If I tell you it’s Russian, it’s Russian, you hear me, you piece of shit?” (The Queen 41). This irrational chauvinism serves to subdue the political enemy, exerting instinctual violence upon him. In the historical period in question, being a ship “rat” does not even mean being a European immigrant, but rather an outcast and a communist. Likewise, being “Russian” does not strictly refer to nationality but to the fact of being an enemy of the hegemonic powers throughout Western Europe and America. In the context of dirty war, “Russian” thus points to an external element that threatens “civilization,” and the repudiation of the other thus reveals its largely imagined, phantasmal nature (Žižek 85). The xenophobia of the military—the Eurocentric legacy that continues to mark collective life in the West (Balibar 327), including America—is activated here in the name of reproducing a particular political system.
The violence that marks and instills chaos in the lives of Mabel, Jacobsen, and Consuelo (who is in turn raped by one of her mother’s clients), what Žižek calls objective violence (systemic violence, of which the helpless, raped, marginalized woman is a victim), as well as the subjective and concrete violence exercised by the military, contrasts sharply with the government’s official rhetoric. Military governments promote the model of the “true” patriot, docile and subordinate, as the colonial subject was before. About to undergo a clandestine abortion, Consuelo hears on the radio:
But today, the homeland and the world remain under threat. The enemy of freedom is not dead and is working (…low) in the shadows, plotting (…loving) the terror and violence that our peoples do not want. And that is why today, on the eve of another anniversary of the swearing in of the Constitution, we renew (…let’s go) our vows and swear to defend it with our lives (…gone), even if it is the last thing we do to bequeath to our children a world of peace and freedom, to the joy of our memory (…dying memory). (La reina 116)
Homeland, comments Consuelo, this “macho little word” that only serves as a pretext for “the monsters who put a price and ownership on everything” (La reina 130). Her high school classmate, Abayubá, ironically dissects the same stereotype in its Uruguayan version:
that blind and stupid pride infuriates him… Oh, yes, we are a cultured people and our university is the envy of other countries; we are the Switzerland of America, because we are so small and our democracy is so peaceful […] a very cultured people, yes, steeped in the culture of machismo and corruption, even if they later say, with the old and tired argument, that corruption here is not as bad as there, because, of course, in Argentina and Brazil everything is the same but bigger, so we’re not so bad after all […] That’s right, a cultured people, a mixture of every proud European race that was dissatisfied over there and came to a country without earthquakes and without Indians. (La reina 102-05)
In El mar estaba sereno (The Sea Was Calm), the same ironic demystification of nationalist impositions continues into the second decade of the 21st century. One of the characters argues that Uruguayans are modest because “the practice and visceral need of this little corner of the world […] is to stone anyone who dares to raise their head above the rest. Hence, the famous humility of Uruguayans is perhaps nothing more than resentment and the demand for [sic] general mediocrity” (El mar 345).
As in several other Latin American novels of recent decades, where the search for one’s own identity generates tension between the national and the post-national, Majfud’s characters turn “to their most personal memories, closest to their own experience, to counteract the influence of indoctrination” (Pérez Daniel 221). Thus, Mabel searches her own features for the secret of her origins:
I would sit in front of the mirror and study my face. I tried to guess from these lips, these eyes, and this nose the face of my father, the country from which he had come. I would return to the mirror and see in my eyes the eyes of a Viking woman, looking out at the cold sea, waiting for her man […] Other times I would comb my hair and think that it had once belonged to a young Polish woman. (La reina 30)
Her supposed Nordic blood on her father’s side sustains in Consuelo a private identity fantasy much more powerful than the one instilled in her mind by the slogans hammered into her at school, such as, for example, “Sing with passion and decorum […], looking straight ahead, your right hand on your heart that beats for your National Symbols” (La reina 100). The ideologeme of (collective) blood purity is deactivated here in the face of the observation of one’s own body, which is believed to be the bearer of a hybrid genealogy. Jacobsen, Mabel’s father, also fantasizes about his origins in the aforementioned interrogation scene, involving Scandinavian myths (and stereotypes):
he wonders what he has in common with those Vikings who crossed the North Atlantic a thousand years ago. Since childhood, he had imagined them as gods who knew only the fear of others. He walked the damp roads of Fyn, where his grandfather Sune lived, surrounded by the Jørgensen fields, and could not imagine the pain of barbarism, the agitated sweat of war, the sadness of abandonment. There he was in front of him, that man in uniform, with black hair and deliberately slow speech, who was essentially nothing more than one of those barbarians who sank ships in Nydam Mose . That man [the colonel] was more Viking than he was, who only had the blood. (The Queen 39)
In contrast to the offensive label of “Russian” (mentioned above), Jakobsen now equates the Uruguayan military with the barbaric “Vikings,” reversing and defusing the offense. In short, traditional patriotism is represented in Majfud’s novels as a device that no longer has any integrative power. Based on a nationalism of labels, it became, in the second half of the 20th century (the time in which most of these stories are set), essentially repressive.
From a transatlantic perspective, the fates of the protagonists sometimes maintain a tragic parallel with each other, as in the novel El mar estaba sereno (The Sea Was Calm), in which two stories of war violence, generating trauma, intersect. On the one hand, there is the story of Don Jordi Caballero, a Spaniard living in Uruguay, whose father was killed during the Spanish Civil War and th , and on the other, the story of Santiago Zabala, a Uruguayan whose parents were killed by the military and who was later adopted by another family. Both men’s lives were marked by a seminal scene of violence that took place during their childhood. Another repetition of a historical-vital pattern affects, in the same novel, the old Galician Suárez. This former Spanish Republican works as a waiter in the Lugano bar in Montevideo. The day after the 1973 coup d’état, he is told to “go find another homeland because this one wasn’t working out for him either” (El mar 53). And they sarcastically advise him to move to the Congo. Twice, in his youth and in his old age, and on two opposite shores of the Atlantic, the political convictions of the Galician Suárez make him persecuted and undesirable.
The erosion of a rhetorical and superficial patriotism (which in fact serves to classify and subordinate) is also recorded in the novel Crisis, which chronicles the misfortunes of Latino migrants in the United States. One of them encounters, in many places in the United States, the same scenarios, supposedly familiar to him: long tables with Mexican food, “with typical tiles that look like they were handmade in Zócalo or Seville” (Crisis 17), repeating the same smells, motifs, and costumes. Instead of fostering local pride, this experience leads to alienation, relativizing the seductive power of local color.
Everything will run like a road movie, everything will be another place and it will be the same […] Everything will move and nothing will change, as if you could get lost in your own home. And you will live almost with pleasure, fleeing from something, from someone, and from yourself, because fleeing and getting lost is the only form of freedom you will know here. And you will feel like nobody and you will feel like everyone. (Crisis 18)
It is legitimate to connect the intensity of the theme of identity and migrants in Majfud’s novels with the “narrative of the identity crisis of a generation of Uruguayans between the ages of twenty-five and forty” (Montoya 46). It should be noted, however, that this issue is fully embedded here in a current global context, in which migration is the norm rather than the exception.
Universal criticism of cruelty
In line with his tendency to universalize identity issues, Majfud revisits his criticism of chauvinism, transferring it to a fantastical territory, the city of Catalaid, a supposed “oasis of white Christians” who took refuge there after the liberation of Algiers in the 1950s. The history of the city combines the remote with the modern and the realistic with the magical. Majfud even invents a fictional variety of Spanish with an archaic flavor for this heterotopic space. The mentality of local society is the quintessence of closed-mindedness, cruelty, stupidity, and the drive for collective integration—with its corresponding share of racism and intolerance:
in Calataid they hated blacks more than Americans in general, since the latter were barely imaginary beings. Not only because the myth of the Aryan white man, or simply the white man, had arrived from central Europe, not only because Calataid was an oasis of white Christians in the desert, definitively alone since the independence of Algeria, but because they were surrounded by savage Moors […] At the same time, these secret hatreds did not prevent the inhabitants of Calataid from considering themselves the moral reserve of the world, which is why each of them suffered from chronic patriotism that was expressed in the idolatry of the symbols of the people. […] a people suffering from fragmentation needs a flag that says Union, needs that lie to survive its own dissolution, to become monstrously strong, until finally uniformity and definitive decadence triumph. (The City 14-15)
The main characters, Basílides and his sister, nicknamed “Bird,” are rejected by their un y environment because of their physical oddities (he with his monstrous Minotaur head, she a lesbian and legless since birth) and their artistic talents. The relentless conservatism and cruelty of the inhabitants of Catalaid take on fantastical and grotesque overtones: the Moors are feared, hands are cut off as punishment, animals are made to suffer, books are burned.
With this fantasy horror story, Majfud creates an allegory of the current moral decline that accompanies the impressive technological progress of modernity. The image of a pseudo-medieval society closed in on itself refers to certain current phenomena, such as the dissociation of collective consciousness, incapable of processing information about global injustice and adjusting it to an effective moral stance. The novel caricatures this tendency to forget the suffering of others (both those close to us and those in other parts of the world). Many individuals today reject a morality of solidarity and “would be willing to give up a part of their freedom in exchange for being able to forget the terrifying specter of existential insecurity” (Bauman and Donskis 129). Catalaid’s “lunar” heterotopia ultimately points to certain collective reflexes, as old as humanity itself, that can arise on both sides of the Atlantic, in the old “centers” and “peripheries”: anti-civilized brutality, hostility towards misfits, towards external or internal immigrants.
More realistic is the social and political denunciation in the novel Crisis, where the fictional status does not prevent the author from making a sharp analysis of the mechanisms of capitalism in its current phase, which confines masses of migrants to a precarious situation with no way out. A narrative patchwork, Crisis is composed of short stories about Latin American migrants arriving in the “Empire” and reflections on the callous exploitation of the most vulnerable. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Colombians, Uruguayans from the most diverse backgrounds and professions—women and men who pick fruit or work illegally in manufacturing companies, a narcocorrido singer, a Latina woman detained by immigration, a father, an intellectual “ “—see their desire to settle in the North undermined by the exhaustion of living in constant insecurity. The narrator sympathizes with these “sisters and brothers” of his, the outsiders (Crisis 18) of the “Sociedad Anónima” (Anonymous Society) of white gringos.
Migration reveals its dark side; it no longer means adventure and hope but the flattening or annulment of identity. Americans tend to reduce Latinos to stereotypes and identify them with Tex-Mex culture. Throughout the text, there are several stories of women, but they are all called “Guadalupe,” a generic name for Latinas exploited by “coyotes,” businessmen, and intermediaries. Men are also designated by the same name, “Ernesto.” Although, at first glance, the lives of the Ernestos and Lupitas do not always seem “superfluous” in the strict sense given by Bauman (Lives 21-50)—because Latino labor is necessary to the American economy—they are, nevertheless, they are the most exposed to suffering the causes of crises, always on the verge of slipping into the socially excluded, “residual,” and “disposable” social . Their destinies continue to be affected by the consequences of globalization, which, according to decolonial theories, began in 1492. First, millions of people were violently included in the global economy and then, in our times, many others have been excluded from progressive and consumer societies (without the fundamental ideology having changed, see Dussel 345-86; Bauman, Lives). The novel creates a tension between, on the one hand, the terrible experiences of some characters and, on the other, the anonymity of the repeated names, which alludes to the misery multiplied by large numbers. This effect of “dehumanization” gives the novel an anti-epic effect (Taiano 52).
To alleviate the problems that afflict them, migrants can turn to their respective “societies of feeling” (Appadurai’s term), formed around religious or cultural symbols. In the novel, these are treated in a more parody- . A narcocorrido singer explains his mission in the United States as follows: “the race always maintains its traditions and enjoys our narcocorrido dance, which we bring to all our Latino brothers so that they remain joyful and do not become discouraged at the first obstacle, and always remember the holy death that is capable of terrible punishments for those who mock it” (Crisis 45). The exclusion of immigrants based on stereotypes is due not only to the prejudices of Americans of European origin, but also to those of other Latinos, born in the North, eager to integrate at the cost of renouncing their roots. An integrated Latino teenager accepts that a friend, the son of more recent immigrants, is beaten up for hugging and kissing a quinceañera at his party: “He didn’t grope her, but that’s how they all start. You know who I mean. […] They don’t know how to respect personal space and then they lose control. No, my parents were Mexican, but they came in legally and graduated from the University of San Diego. No, not , no… I’m American, sir, don’t get me wrong” (Crisis 35).
Crisis thus illustrates the social and ideological diversity of the tens of millions of Latinos living in the North. Many of them are conservative, even pro-American chauvinists, who label opponents of the government as “communists” (61, 85), support Republican congressmen, and welcome interventions “in defense” of global democracy (29-32).
In short, American society at the beginning of the 21st century, as depicted in Crisis, resembles more a hodgepodge of stereotypes than a politically correct melting pot of cultures. Latinos also contribute to this with their simplifications and naivety. This exacerbates differences and increases internal boundaries, both visible and invisible, racial, social, and cultural. The wealthy distance themselves from the poor, the “better Americans” from other Latinos, and the Anglo-Saxons from everyone else.
Among the multitude of protagonists in Crisis, one can distinguish the consciousness of a subject who is more privileged due to his education, but who nevertheless remains “a beaten man, resentful of the worse luck of [his] brothers and sisters” (Crisis 18). In such passages, the novel reveals its vindictive intent—to turn the misfortunes of fleeting and anonymous protagonists into novelistic life. The voice that carries this commitment points to a probable alter ego of the author and, at the same time, to one of the male protagonists (one of the “Ernestos”), who is a Uruguayan intellectual reduced to precarious conditions. Plagued by multiple contradictions, Ernesto resents having to adapt, for material reasons , to conditions that he finds humiliating (“we went to where the dollars are printed” 94) and having to swallow “all the lies that drip sweetly from the spheres of Wall Street” (105). His guilty conscience thus suggests another possible interpretation of the novel’s title.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that Majfud treats his possible alter ego with self-irony: “You have to put up with Ernesto’s nagging,” comments one character, “[…] now it seems that he also writes in Chili’s, another eccentricity of intellectuals, those little notes that are published in the subcontinent’s pamphlets as if they were essays that are going to save the human race” (Crisis 68). Ernesto is of the ilk of ungrateful intellectuals who bite the hand that feeds them and tend to spoil patriotic celebrations and consumerist banquets with comments such as the following:
Now, if the logic of profit is not bad even for a socialist living in a capitalist world, why hide it? “It doesn’t matter how much the gift is worth, as long as it is given from the heart.” Sic, Best Buy. … Our entire culture is based on masks, almost all of them narratives. In the same way, the secular world of capitalism is masked by the religious narrative that predominates in societies such as the United States. (Crisis 67)
This last argument appeared first in the article “Consumo, ergo soy” (I consume, therefore I am), dated 2008, and from there it went, literally, to Crisis. For Majfud, literature not only conveys “the multiple depths of emotions,” but also “the vertigo of ideas” (Majfud, “¿Para qué sirve?”). Hence, he does not mind promoting this type of crossover between journalism and fiction, making his personal commitment to criticizing the “hidden hand” of the market and capitalism ostensible. One could object to his excessive taste for controversy, which, indeed, often extends into his novels. He manages, however, to balance the share of novelistic debates with the successes of a style given to brevity and aphoristic , with his talent for plotting stories and, finally, with the intensity of a tone that conveys his personal urgency to defend values useful to human communities.
Majfud’s critique broadly coincides with that of liberation philosophy and decolonial theory (Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo), which traces the colonial legacy in the current process of “globalization-exclusion.” The migrants in the novels discussed can be conceived as cases of systemic injustice inherent in global capitalism, which is diffuse and inalienable. Mabel, the young Spanish woman who becomes a prostitute (La reina); Jacobsen, the militant who ends up in prison (La reina); the Cuban prostitute, mother of Enrique Sosa (El mar); the baby Lucía, an orphan found on the street (El mar), and Hatuey, an Iraq veteran traumatized during his mission in Iraq and unable to lead a normal life upon his return (Crisis, El mar): all of them are threatened with the risk of becoming outcasts, “superfluous” to the capitalist order, true human “ “ “waste,” and “residue” (Bauman, Lives 24-28). However, several of them develop a flexible and tolerant mindset, “which measures global progress from the minority perspective,” which, according to Homi Bhabha, characterizes “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (XVI): such are, for example, Abayubá from El mar estaba sereno or Basílides from La ciudad de la luna. These protagonists, together with the narrators (who are in turn very close to the author), embody a “situated ethical consciousness,” representing a new form of American intelligence, very much in tune with our times (Dussel, Hacia 445; Filosofías 42).
Aínsa, Fernando. Del canon a la periferia. Encuentros y transgresiones en la literatura uruguaya. Montevideo: Trilce, 2002.
—”Discurso identitario y discurso literario en América Latina.” América. Mémoires, identités, territoires. 1 (2010) http://journals.openedition.org/amerika/478; DOI: 10.4000/amerika.47
—”New Cartography of Belonging. The Loss of Territory in Latin American Narrative,” Iberoamericana 14.54 (2014). 111-26.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity Run Amok: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Remedi, Gustavo, trans. Montevideo-Buenos Aires: Trilce-Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001.
Balibar, Étienne. “¿Existe un racismo europeo?” [Is There Such a Thing as European Racism?]. Violencias, civilidades, identidad [Violence, Civility, Identity]. Padilla, Luis, trans. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2005. 15-46.
Barahona, Karen. “On Crisis (novel by Jorge Majfud).” Latin America in Motion (2014) https://www.alainet.org/es/active/71027
Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Hermida Lazcano, Pablo, trans. Buenos Aires-Barcelona-Mexico: Paidós, 2005.
Bauman, Zygmunt and Leonidas Donskis. Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Rodríguez Esteban, Antonio Francisco, trans. Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico: Paidós, 2017.
Bhabha, Homi. “Looking back, moving forth: notes on vernacular cosmopolitanism.” Preface to Location of Culture. New York: Routledge Classic Edition, 2004. IX-XXV.
Denis, Benoît. Literature and Engagement, Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Dussel, Enrique. Hacia una filosofía política crítica. Mendieta, Eduardo, intr. Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001.
—Filosofías del Sur. Descolonialización y transmodernidad, Mexico City: Ediciones Akal México, 2017.
Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. García Pérez, Ricardo. trans. Barcelona: Península, 2013.
Esteban, Ángel and Jesús Montoya Juárez. “Latin American Narrative Beyond the Airport.” Between the Local and the Global. Latin American Narrative at the Turn of the Century (1990-2006). Jesús Montoya Juárez, Jesús and Ángel Esteban, eds. Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2008.
—”Deterritorialized or Multiterritorialized? Hispanic American Narrative in the 21st Century.” Literature Beyond the Nation. On the Centripetal and Centrifugal in 21st-Century Hispanic American Literature. Francisca Noguerol, et al. ( , eds. Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2011. 7-14.
García Canclini, Nestor. Latin Americans in Search of a Place in This Century, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002.
Hannerz, Ulrich. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.” Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. Gomis, María, trans. Valencia: Cátedra-University of Valencia, 1998.
Noguerol, Francisca. “Narrating Without Borders.” Between the Local and the Global. Latin American Narrative at the Turn of the Century (1990-2006). Montoya Juárez, Jesús and Ángel Esteban, eds. Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2008. 19-33.
Majfud, Jorge. “¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (II)” [What is literature for? (II)]. Escritos críticos, 2003, https://majfud.org/2011/03/05/nuevo-%C2%BFpara-que-sirve-la-literatura-ii/ (accessed 13.05.2019)
—Crisis, Tenerife: Baile del Sol Ediciones, 2012.
—Critique of Pure Passion, Tenerife: Baile del Sol Ediciones, [1998] 2007.
—The Sea Was Calm, Tenerife: Baile del Sol Ediciones, 2017.
—The City of the Moon, Tenerife: Baile del Sol Ediciones, 2007.
—The Literature of Commitment, doctoral thesis. Athens: The University of Georgia, 2008.
—La reina de América, Tenerife: Baile del Sol Ediciones, [2002] 2018.
Montoya Juárez, Jesús. “‘La Suisse n’existe pas’. A posthuman and transnational rewriting of Uruguayan identity.” Literature beyond the nation. On the centripetal and centrifugal in 21st-century Spanish American literature, Francisca Noguerol, et al. eds. Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2011. 45-59.
López-Terra, Federico. “Narrating the crisis. Representation and agency in post-crisis Spain.” Precarious narratives. Crisis and subjectivity in current Spanish culture . Ed. Christian Claesson. Gijón: Hoja de Lata, 2019.
Ortega, Julio. “Post-theory and transatlantic studies,” Iberoamericana. Latin America–Spain–Portugal, 3.9 (2003). 110-17.
Pérez Daniel, Iván. “Memories of collapse: representations of history and Mexican nationalism in Juan Villoro’s Materia dispuesta,” Hispanic Review. 81.2 (2013): 201–23.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” The Coloniality of Knowledge: Eurocentrism and the Social Sciences. Latin American Perspectives. Lander, Edgardo, ed. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000: 201-46.
Taiano, Leonor. “Crisis: The Majfudian Commitment and the Latin American Diaspora.” Cincinnati Romance Review 44 (2018). 48-65.
Žižek, Slavoj. On Violence: Six Marginal Reflections. Translated by Antonio J. Antón Fernández. Barcelona: Paidós, 2009.
Other studies by the same author
“Literatura nieobojętna : marksizm w powieściach Belén Gopegui”
Source: In: Literatura a polityka = Literatur und Politik / scientific editors Tomasz Szybisty, Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec, Bruno Arich-Gerz, Angelika Schneiger, Stefan Hermes, Tobiasz Janikowski, Anna Górajek
Publisher: Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 2020
ISBN: 978-83-235-4361-9
“The New Man in Spanish American Essay and Literature at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Century”
Source: Politeja. Journal of the Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University. 2020, no. 64, pp. 255–269
ISSN: 1733-6716
ISSN: 2391-6737
Title: “The police speak: novelistic polyphony and democratic debate in some Spanish novels about Francoism and the Transition”
Source: Politeja. Journal of the Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University. – 2019, no. 60, pp. 115-138
ISSN: 1733-6716
“Vargas Llosa and the natives: on knowing the Other for oneself”
Source: Konteksty Kultury. – 2019, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 358-375
ISSN: 2083-7658
ISSN: 2353-1991
“Towards what homelands of silence”: Juan José Saer’s unorthodox patriotism / Nina Pluta-Podleszańska
Source: Castilla-Estudios de Literatura. – 2019, no. 10, pp. 623-643
Notes: Publication indexed in the Scopus database.
ISSN: 1989-7383
“Secular mysticism in the age of counterculture: Edward Stachura and Julio Cortázar”
Source: Iberian Studies. – 2018, no. 17, pp. 195-209
ISSN: 2082-8594
ISSN: 2391-7636
“New interpersonal relationships in the prose of Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and the authors of La Onda mexicana in light of the countercultural proposals of the 1960s”
Source: In: The New Man: Visions, Projects, Languages / edited by Stanisław Jasionowicz
Publisher: Krakow: Wydawnictwo Unum, 2017
ISBN: 978-83-7643-142-0
ISBN: 978-83-7643-143-7
“Homeland: from familiar space to foreign space in the narrative of Juan José Saer”
Source: In: Migrations and diasporas in contemporary Latin America / coordinators: Karol Derwich, Monika Sawicka
Publisher: Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017
“Fear and ways of seeing. On the representation of fear in contemporary Spanish American narrative”
Source: Romanica Silesiana. – 2016, Vol. 2, No. 11, p. 1
ISSN: 1898-2433
“Natural space and its traces in language: on the novels of José Ángel González Sainz / Nina Pluta
Source: In: Images of the world, spaces of the work: literature – visual arts / edited by Stanisław Jasionowicz
Publisher: Krakow: Wydawnictwo Unum, 2016
ISBN: 978-83-7643-126-0
ISBN: 978-83-7643-127-7
“Under construction or on a journey: notes on the representation of Latin American identity in contemporary narrative”
Source: Politeja. Journal of the Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University. – 2015, no. 38, pp. 195-208
ISSN: 1733-6716
“Who is a classic today?: Roberto Bolaño, or a step into the darkness”
Source: In: Katedra Bolaño: critical sketches / edited by Wojciech Charchalis and Arkadiusz Żychliński
Publisher: Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz University Press, 2015
ISBN: 978-83-232-2834-9
“Between Worlds”
Source: Politeja. Journal of the Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University. 2015, no. 38, pp. 257-262
Notes: Review article: Between Worlds: Interpreters and Intercultural Communication in the Literature of the Discovery and Conquest of America / Marzena Chrobak. – Krakow, 2012.
ISSN: 1733-6716
“Roberto Bolaño: Traditional or Innovative, Local or Transatlantic?”
Source: In: Identity in motion: borders, migrations, and intercultural dialogue in the Hispanic world / studies coordinated by Adriana Sara Jastrzębska
Publisher: Bielsko-Biała: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Techniczno-Humanistycznej, 2014
ISBN: 978-83-63713-95-9
“The shadow of crime: the influence of the crime genre on Spanish American narrative at the turn of the millennium”
Publisher: Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej, 2012
ISBN: 978-83-7271-755-
“Investigating” family mysteries in the context of repressed history (Ricardo Piglia, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Rodrigo Rey Rosa)
Source: Scientific Works of the University of Silesia. Romanica Silesiana. 2011, No. 6, pp. 133-147
“Secret, evil, and fear: the crime genre reimagined in Roberto Bolano’s 2666”
Source: Scientific Papers of the University of Silesia. Romanica Silesiana. 2010, No. 5, pp. 147-161
“History of Latin American Literature / Ewa Łukaszyk”
Publisher: Wrocław: Ossoliński National Institute – Publishing House, 2010
“Postmodern detective fiction and the questioning of commitment: the case of Edmundo Paz Soldán”
Source: Castilla. – 2010, no. 1, p. 16
“Interpreters, or how the protagonists of Spanish-American pseudo-crime fiction approach reality”
Source: Iberian Studies. 2009, no. 8, p. 12
Debe estar conectado para enviar un comentario.