Citizens of Nowhere: Stateless and Refugee Literature in Latin America

Abstract

This work analyzes a transmedial and transnational constellation of primarily literary texts (poetry, fiction, prose, and art) created predominantly by Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals concerning the refugees fleeing World War II. Its main claim is that, through their works, a series of Latin American authors and artists (Gabriela Mistral, Lasar Segall, Victoria Ocampo, Pablo Neruda, and João Guimarães Rosa) articulated the cultural, historicopolitical, and ethical implications of the emergence and spread of statelessness in the world and participated in the articulation of a new set of cosmopolitan set of rights in the aftermath of World War II. More broadly, it analyzes how literature (and aesthetic form, broadly conceived), and particularly Latin American literature and art, documented and worked through the creation of a new historical subject in modernity —the stateless person— and intervened in the articulation of the human rights agenda promoted by the United Nations during the postwar era. Its approach is informed by archival research, in dialogue with theoretical conceptualizations of statelessness’ legal and political consequences and tackled through a comparative and transatlantic perspective that studies works by refugee writers who found asylum in Latin America during the war; specifically, Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. Additionally, it draws on contemporary experiences and crises of forced displacement by examining works such as art by Brazilian artist and poet Leila Danziger and fiction by Argentinian-Peruvian-Spanish writer Miguel Enesco.