Itinerant Citizens: Imagining Global Citizenship in the Works of Osvaldo Soriano

Authors

  • Leila Lehnen University of New Mexico

Keywords:

Osvaldo Soriano, globa citizenship, itnerant citizens

Abstract

Global citizenship is at the heart of this chapter on Osvaldo Soriano’s post-national novels, La hora sin sombra and Una sombra ya pronto serás.  Parsing the tension between national and global cultural flows, Lehnen’s examination of Soriano addresses one of the more complex themes taken on by the Generation of ’72: that of the forced global citizen.  National iconographies darken and folkloric spaces, such as the Argentine Pampa, are hollowed out as “liquid modernities” replace the relative stability of national economies.  This reification of spatial symbolic charge acts as a literary analogy for life under both the Junta and Menem, for Lehnen, speaking to the erosion of the basic functions of citizenship and the nation-state.

Author Biography

Leila Lehnen, University of New Mexico

Leila Lehnen is Associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in contemporary Brazilian and Southern Cone literature. Her book Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature (forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan) examines the representation and critique of disjunctive citizenship (Holston 2008) in contemporary Brazilian literature. Leila Lehnen has published articles on globalization in Brazilian and Spanish American literature, among other topics. She is currently working on the interface between globalization and the formulation of citizenship in present-day Argentine, Chilean and Brazilian literature.

Published

2012-10-15

How to Cite

Lehnen, L. (2012). Itinerant Citizens: Imagining Global Citizenship in the Works of Osvaldo Soriano. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 10(1), 171–197. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/623

Issue

Section

Dossier: Poesía e imagen