- Toxic Waste, Toxic Masculinity: Femicide, Ecocide and the Slow Violence of Globalization in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
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Abstract:
- I am passionate about global literatures and the way the uneven development of globalisation/global capitalism is represented in literature. The literary landscape constructed in Bolano's 2666 provides the ideal backbone for an analysis of the way globalisation and uneven development manifest themselves in peripheral zones, and interact with issues of gender, class and environment. Merging feminism, eco-criticism, and literary criticism and bringing to the surface the tight relationship between literature and history which characterises Bolano's novel, I demonstrated the way femicide and ecocide appear to be related and akin phenomena within modernity. I argue that both are pushed to the margins of global consciousness, but that their marginality represents, simultaneously, a looming threat: that of total annihilation, either through the destruction of the "generative Mother" (womxn) or of the planet we live on. Bolano's fictional city of Santa Teresa revealed itself to be the epitome of the modern, neoliberal peripheral where the violence of advanced capitalism is legible. The depiction of Santa Teresa as such thus contributes to the shedding of light on the uneven development of globalisation in our material reality and history: Santa Teresa is, in fact, but the fictional counterpart of the real city of Ciudad Juarez.
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