Search

The civilization / barbarism dichotomy, from Sarmiento guiding the national construction process, served as frontiers as one of the founding pieces in the construction of subaltern and excluded national identities. This produced groups that were habitually invisible or, when not, reviled by the national literature subsidiary of the discourse of power. Returning to these categories, frontier and rewriting (Garramuño, 1997), in this article we will try to visualize the deconstructive process carried out by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's novel, The Adventures of China Iron (2017), to permeabilize, erode and tear down those geographical and imaginary lines and often arbitrary, which we call borders. We start from the hypothesis that this rewriting exercise, in the mere fact of breaking down geographical boundaries, enables, in turn, the dismantling of all social conventions that operate as hierarchical segregators of otherness, for example, names or races, social or cultural backgrounds and, more than anything, gender and sexual orientation. In this way, we can ask ourselves if the blurring of the border, which shielded the dystopian world of the Indian from that of the Christians in Martín Fierro, does not facilitate the entrance to utopia in the rewriting of Cabezón Cámara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]