Narrative Unmoored: Photography, Orientalism, and Geopolitics in Roberto Arlt's “La cadena del ancla”

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of “La cadena del ancla,” a short story that Roberto Arlt wrote as a journalist while on assignment in Morocco during the mid-1930s, from the perspective of postcolonial studies and visual culture. While focusing on the themes of espionage and revenge, it analyzes Orientalist storytelling as a praxis of writing alongside history, through which the Argentine writer documented the rivalry between global colonial powers in 1935. By examining the main characters’ displacement along the coast of North Africa, from Tangier to Cairo, the essay aims to open up the lines of interconnectivity between photography and narrative, visual arts and Mediterranean geopolitical flows. Arlt engages a “repertoire of Orientalism” by interpolating what Graham Huggan has called the “postcolonial exotic,” but he also subverts it by inviting history into the pages of his short story. When read with a postcolonial understanding of the writer's travels, Arlt's visual projection of his experiences in Spain and Morocco makes us better understand how they became an integral part of his more explicitly politicized future writing, especially his plays África (1938) and La fiesta del hierro (1940).

Keywords:

• Roberto Arlt
• orientalism
• photography
• postcolonial exotic
• travel writing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would especially like to thank the Instituto Ibero-Americano in Berlin for providing access to Roberto Arlt's photographs. The research for this article was completed during my residency at New York University where I was the Faculty Resource Network visiting scholar in the summer of 2014. I also owe a debt of gratitude to James D. Fernández from NYU for reading earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹I follow Ian Almond's characterization of Orientalism and Post-Orientalism in his thought-provoking article “Borges the Post-Orientalist: Images of Islam from the Edge of the West.”

²Benita Sampedro Vizcaya focuses on Equatorial Guinea, while Francisco Hernández Adrián and Eyda Merediz examine the Canary Islands (in different time periods), where Arlt's transatlantic vessel made a brief stop before arriving to Cádiz in 1935. For a broader critical theory discussion of the Atlantic, see Sampedro Viscaya's “Engaging the Atlantic: New Routes, New Responsibilities” and, also from 2012, Abril Trigo's “Los estudios transatlánticos y la geopolítica del neo-hispanismo.”

³In The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Graham Huggan discusses the exoticist discourses often found in postcolonial studies and the means by which postcolonial cultural products are marketed for Western consumption.

⁴Within North Africa, the anticolonial movements propelled by Arab nationalism ended with the decolonization of the region. Tunisia and Morocco were freed from French colonial rule in 1956, and Algeria, where France stayed the longest, in 1962.

⁵Here I echo Tzvetan Todorov's claim from Chapter 1 (“The Universal and the Relative”) of his book On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, in the section titled “The Effects of Humanism”: “If contemporary communications tend to bring people closer together, the weight of history, which will always be with us, pulls us (whatever Comte may have claimed) in the opposite direction” (72).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gorica Majstorovic

Gorica Majstorovic (PhD, NYU) is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies Coordinator at Stockton University. Her research concerns the intersection of comparative literary history and postcolonial studies, with particular emphasis on cosmopolitanism and visual arts in the Global South.