Representations of Power and Marginality in the Literature of the Argentine Northwest

Abstract

The cultural and social space of the periphery in the Northwestern Argentine region is much more than a political and geographical destiny. From pre-Hispanic times to the present, its condition of marginality has been repeatedly reproduced.

The dichotomous constructions of center/periphery and power/marginality become conflictive nuclei insofar as they must resist the mark of a border zone that corresponds to them for belonging to the “periphery of the periphery”. Mignolo aptly notes that “Frantz Fanon conceptualized border zones as zones of colonial expansion and as zones of violence rather than contact”. It is precisely this violence against being, against identity, against Western culture and its progress, and against Andean culture and its supposed backwardness, that can be observed in the works of Carlos Hugo Aparicio and Alberto Alabí.

A reading of the short stories reveals the organization of spaces of power, which always coincide with “the city” and delimit marginal spaces. Present domination generates places of resistance that vary according to each story but that appear in all of them as a correlate of the displacement between power and marginality.

The structures that generate this space of social and economic separation, both in Aparicio’s and in Alabí’s short stories, are produced through narrative sequences of possession, search, and vindication, in constant tension with power.