Imagining Ecuador: Crisis, Transnationalism and Contemporary Fiction

This book revisits the eroded space of the nation in Latin America to tackle one central question: how is Ecuador being (re)imagined in contemporary literature? It departs from a rereading of Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), Ecuador's national novel, to posit that contemporary Ecuadorian writers are actively constructing today's Ecuador from a common ground of experience shaped by the consequences of the 1998 Feriado Bancario, the worst economic crisis the country has yet experienced. By focusing on Eliécer Cárdenas' novel El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), this book proposes that fiction engages with and helps us to make sense of the national reality that emerged after the economic collapse. The book expands this point by analysing three Ecuadorian novels published after the crisis: Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alemán's Humo (2017). The analysis puts forward that contemporary Ecuadorian literature responds to the crisis by reimagining Ecuador as a transnational space. And crucially, in aiding us to see Ecuador transnationally, contemporary Ecuadorian literature also engages with a broader discussion regarding the exhaustion of single-nation frameworks for reading and understanding literature. This book places this discussion not only in the Latin American context but also in the 'global' domain of World Literature, a field of enquiry enriched by knowledge of the Ecuadorian case. Contemporary Ecuadorian literature broadens our consciousness of the world as a whole. However, this work concludes, it does so from a minoritarian position, from where it is capable of revealing alternative paths to consider the globality of Latin American novels as well as their challenges and contributions to the study of World Literature.