Travel, borders, and migrations: literary space as territory(ies) in transit

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the literature produced by authors who challenge the notion of mother tongue by adding a second or third language to their repertoire, one that may or may not correspond to the territory where they reside. In this linguistic transition, writers such as Ernesto Quiñonez, Paloma Vidal and Laura Alcoba construct literary projects with porosities that overflow concepts such as identity, nation, and language. These are authors of Latin American origin who, due to migratory movements related to their families, had to settle in another place, with another language, and from this linguistic ambivalence, they began their writing projects. The presence of voices from the past with their current lives proposes a work that cannot be reduced to a space tied to a single territory. It is, therefore, a literature without a fixed place and in which languages ​​are in constant movement. Through the novels Bodega dreams (2000), Algum lugar (2009) and Le bleu des abeilles (2013), I seek to show how a poetics of movement (Ette, 2018) is constructed, which finds in literary language a way to overcome the borders of a national literature and claims a multiple, unfinished identity, always in transit.