From Poso Wells to The Country of the Blind and Back: Extremely Local, Incredibly Global Contemporary Ecuadorian Literature

With the background of an internal armed conflict against drug-related crime in Ecuador, this presentation brings attention to contemporary literature in the Andean country. I position literary creation in Ecuador as a key element not only to understand the context in which the local violence of the transnational drug trade develops but also to see an alternative imagining of the world construed from an enunciation point firmly rooted in the Ecuadorian experience. To explore this idea, I discuss Gabriela Alemán’s novel Poso Wells (2007) and the dialogue it sets up with H. G. Wells’ short story The Country of the Blind (1904) to posit that Alemán’s work should be considered world literature and local literature at once. I argue that by addressing how worldliness coexists with the novel’s highly localised literary life, it is possible to locate the roots of contemporary violence in the inequalities of the North/South divide of the world created by capitalist globalisation. More importantly, it is possible to see hope for a better future for Ecuador and other countries resisting transnational violence as, in this light, the novel enables an alternative imagining of the world where community action triumphs over transnational capital.