A Journey into Mapuche Memory: Self-Translation and Postmemory as a Strategy of World Literature in Liliana Ancalao’s Rokiñ (2020)

A Journey into Mapuche Memory: Self-Translation and Postmemory as a Strategy of World Literature in Liliana Ancalao’s Rokiñ (2020) Melisa Stocco Indigenous Literatures and World Literature: A Geopolitics of Absence As much as world literature represents a shift from earlier Eurocentric approaches to comparative literature, contemporary production by Indigenous authors in Abya Yala, the greater American continent, remains virtually absent in scholarly discussions and literary anthologies, especially when compared to postcolonial Anglo- and Francophone literatures. As suggested by Vilashini Cooppan, the crafting of maps, anthologies, and companions can lead to the dangerous articulation of a congealed “world literature ‘we’” that obdurates the constant becoming of the field and, we might add, renders invisible the contemporaneity of certain minorized productions (195). Anna Brígido-Corachán and César Domínguez have already drawn attention to the “vast and surprising distance” between Indigenous literatures and world literature by illustrating the ethnographic gaze given to Indigenous productions in some renowned world literature anthologies such as Bedford, Longman, and Norton (76–78). In most cases, these works have mainly restricted their focus to texts from colonial [End Page 90] times, such as Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Bedford), Cantares mexicanos (Longman), or the Popol Vuh (Norton), which are in all cases mediated by western authorial figures (Domínguez and Brígido-Corachán 77). As an exception in terms of this periodization, David Damrosch’s work What Is World Literature? refers to the testimonial narrative I, Rigoberta Menchú. Cited as an example of a “highly literary work” related to the experience of subalternization of Indigenous peoples in Guatemala (232), this piece, however, also shows similarities with the aforementioned colonial texts in terms of the operations of transcription, appropriation, and ethnographization at work in its shaping by anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos. Overall, this scenario calls for what Jorge Locane has referred to as the need for a more sharpened critical gaze within literary studies from the Global North regarding the focus of their research (197). Since world literature has set circulation as one of its defining paradigms, a significant shift in academia would place its focus precisely on those literary works that are not circulating globally but are, rather, part of local systems of production, unaligned with the cultural policies of hegemonic publishing houses. A “sociology of absences,” as Locane names this approach (197), would then account for heterogeneity and specificity in world literature. Contemporary Indigenous literatures and languages of Abya Yala would most certainly belong to the absences in the world market dominion, since they can be mostly found in self-editions, government-funded series, or small, regional publishers that have their own located vectors of circulation. The trajectories and dynamics in which these productions are immersed build up interperipheral networks that constitute “significant geographies” (Laachir et al. 5) outside the geopolitical order of the global publishing system. Indeed, despite their minorization (Castro et al. 7), Indigenous literatures are increasingly active in consolidating their production within and across real and imaginary geographies shared by textual, authorial, and linguistic communities in a diversity of genres and aesthetics, as well as in reappropriating their silenced voices, histories, and languages. In fact, the task of revitalization of Indigenous languages, historically affected by cultural and educational policies of stigmatization, is not unfamiliar to Indigenous literatures. The (re)emergence of multilingual literatures in Abya Yala has cultural and political implications that recall Yasemin Yildiz’s “post-monolingual condition” (5), a tendency that opposes the century-long pressure of modern state monolingualism. Yildiz argues that the “monolingual paradigm” was an invention developed in the course of the construction of the modern state in the eighteenth century which organically linked the individual’s identity to a certain language that demarcated a culture and nation (7). [End Page 91] Self-Translation as Resistance to the Monolingual Norm: The Poetry of Liliana Ancalao In Latin America, the process of imposition of Spanish as one of the dominant languages led to the sociolinguistic stigmatization of Indigenous languages across the continent, and, as a consequence, their retraction or extinction. Such a process has gone...

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