No more 'Latin American' literature pleads Iwasaki

"Si Messi no ocupa plaza de extranjero en la Liga, nosotros no deberíamos hacerlo en la literatura"
"If Messi is not a foreigner in la Liga, then we shouldn't be foreigners in literature" - Fernando Iwasaki

My new Twitter obsession is already proving itself useful for my academic life, as I just saw this article tweeted by Chirinos, Iwasaki pide ´acabar´ con la literatura latinoamericana from the Alicante newspaper Diario Información. The main point of the article is that at a conference on challenges in Latin American narrative in Alicante today (which I wish I'd been at!) Peruvian author Fernando Iwasaki argued that now is the time to stop talking about 'Latin American' literature and instead consider it just as 'Spanish language' literature. He maintains that there is little difference between him and authors from the Iberian peninsular, especially in terms of literary influences.

As I want to study Latin American literature, I wonder what Iwasaki would make of that. I certainly agree that we should not believe that Latin American literature can be narrowly defined, nor that it is completely incommensurable with literature from the peninsular. In fact, in my work I will argue that old European ideas of what Latin America should be - 'identity fables' that create national imaginaries, painting a picture of Latin America as exotic, magical, fundamentally different from Europe - are completely false and outdated. We cannot make a value judgement about a text on the provenance of its author, but only on the quality of the work. Nor is Latin America one homogeneous lump - each country, and within that regions, generations, classes, subcultures... - all have their own specificities which deserve to be explored.

 Nonetheless, I don't think that any author can ever completely cut themselves off from their country. Somewhere, even if unconsciously, lived experiences, political, cultural and societal differences, even different geographies must have some affect. While I don't believe in essentialist, innate differences, I do believe that we cannot help internalising certain social constructions. If I were to write a novel, on no matter what subject, something of my English upbringing and mores would seep through, distinguishing it from a novel by someone from the States or Canada or Australia, and in the same way I think not everyone writing in Spanish can be lumped into 'hispanophone literature'.