Between reformation and reinvention: the frontier, the national subject and the emergence of Latin American identity in Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto

Abstract

In this article, we will analyze the role of the frontier in Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto, and how it interacts with Bartolomé Mitre’s historiography and its projection of the Argentinian nation. Through a socio-historical analysis, we will investigate how the novel interrogates the Argentinian national subject –a construction established with the foundation of the national state, through restrictive and discriminatory concepts such as the dicotomy of civilization/barbarism– to underpin our reading hypothesis: through the history of a protagonist who can’t achieve progress or interpret the frontier world that surrounds him, Zama dismantles Occidental rationalism and showcases a complex vision of the Latin American frontier, in which the European paradigm is replaced by native knowledge. Our conclusion is that Di Benedetto’s novel revalues Latin American knowledge, exhibits a “transculturated” Argentinian Identity (using the concept of Angel Rama) and becomes a precedent for “new historical novels”: an emergent wave of literature after the second half of the twentieth century, that revisits the restrictive foundations of the “Argentinian subject” and proposes pluralist methods to comprehend the Argentinian nation, its environments and inhabitants.