Failed state, failed reading. Private and public hegemonic apparatuses in Brazilian and Cuban narratives of the 1990s

Abstract

While City of God (LINS, 1997) chronicles the criminal violence of drug trafficking in the homonymous housing complex between the 1960s and 1980s, Dirty Havana Trilogy (GUTIÉRREZ, 1998) chronicles the material survival through an economy of desire in the neighborhood of Centro Habana during the so-called Cuban Special Period in the years 1994-1995. From a comparative perspective, I will discuss these novels as the “articulation” of a new political subject, grounded in the revision of the categories of state and hegemony from a post-structural angle (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 2001). Indeed, the realist fiction of the failed state –written by “apolitical” narrators in the 1990s who were torn between the end of utopias and the yearning for democracy– is attuned to the “disenchantment” of the citizen-reader of the times. Writing and reading thus behave as democratic acts that aim to “identify” with historically marginalized subjects and thus “articulate” a transformative collective stance –or not. Such a democratizing and transformative literary project proves as failed as the reality it refers to because of the dysfunctional reading practice in Latin American underdevelopment (CÂNDIDO, 1989) that prevents disarming the hegemonic apparatuses (both private in the Brazilian case and public in the Cuban case) in the context of the fictionalized liberal and socialist states.