Borderline Cosmopolitanism and Imaginations of the East in Cuaderno de Prypiat

Abstract

Eastern Europe (as the “other” of Western Europe) is an imaginary spatiality that enables the deconstruction of modern notions of homogenization. These imaginations allow Latin America (with its heterogeneous tradition linked to procedures such as translation or the appropriation of foreign models) to find a way to think itself from a drive for other worlds and for new cosmopolitanisms. Thus, we can understand cosmopolitanism as a way of relating by linking peripheries. A certain exoticism associated with the idea of the East triggers a series of imaginations linked to possible worlds, to indeterminacy and the undecidable. These imaginations assemble, dismantle and expand the known world, and lead us to the question of what kind of worlds it makes possible. It is from this perspective that we propose to analyze the novel Cuaderno de Pripyat (2012), written by Carlos Ríos. In this particular case, the question should be formulated as follows: what world does the “normal accident” of the nuclear power plant produce? We believe that the Chernobyl catastrophe does not obliterate neither experience or narratives, but rather exasperates them and links them on the basis of a “Russian doll” or collage structure that allows us to tell non-individual experiences.