Winner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize
In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the
Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all
bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode,
the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis
in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last
effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The
very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country
marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders.
This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining
the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of
Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the
nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction
which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits
that these novels - Eliécer Cárdenas' El oscuro final del Porvenir
(2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de
Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alemán's Humo (2017) - both
reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no
longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the
Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American
literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery
of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their
minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.
