'Future arrived a long time ago'. Communities in Latin American short stories of the present

Abstract

In Latin American literature of the present, subjectivities in transformation emerge that inhabit border territories in crisis. The protagonists of “Noche de fiesta” by Natalia García Freire (2019), “La furia de las pestes” (2015) by Samanta Schweblin and “Canícula” (2013) by Claudia Hernández abandon their ways of life and habits to transit citizen wastelands in a topography close to nature, in communities with other species, opening renewed surfaces in the face of the opacity of a hostile universe.

These literary texts inscribed in the verbal limits, in the crossroads of lands and ethnicities change, bursting the delegitimization of full citizenships to occupy an oscillating space between shelter and the outdoors. So, what remains when the scorched earth exposes the outside of skins and territory?

These narratives record fertile traces that allow us to approach other ways of life, other (un)livable scenarios, other materialities in the dermal, corporal and territorial dimension, other alterities that are founded on the citizen wasteland and the oblivion of those remnants that remain after the extermination or the precarious survival, sharing uncertain futures that are debated between the living and the sacrificial.