Post-nitrate melancholy: Romance and coloniality in Chilean novels about the desert regions, 1930s-1970s

Cortés Ortuño, Javier 2024. Post-nitrate melancholy: Romance and coloniality in Chilean novels about the desert regions, 1930s-1970s. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis analyses a series of Chilean fictional works produced from the 1930s to the 1970s that depict the northernmost regions of the country, Tarapacá and Antofagasta during the peak period of nitrate extraction (which ends in the first decades of the twentieth century) in the Atacama Desert where these regions are located. The works selected include Víctor Domingo Silva’s El cachorro (1937); Eduardo Barrios’ Tamarugal (1944); Luis González Zenteno’s Caliche (1954) and Los pampinos (1956); Manuel Rojas’ Punta de rieles (1960); and Actas de Marusia, a 1976 film by Miguel Littin, inspired by a story from Patricio Manns that would only be published in 1993. These novels deploy variations of the formula of foundational romances—originally discussed by Doris Sommer (1991)—aimed to recreate in fiction the incorporation of the desert regions that Chile annexed from its northern neighbours, Peru and Bolivia, after the War of the Pacific. These romances cast the Chilean roto as the protagonist of literary reimaginations of a colonial narrative according to which the desert was a foreign land of riches to be conquered and made productive by the Chilean nation. From the series of novels that reenacted this formula, we can observe the development of a narrative trend that I label post-nitrate melancholy: an insistent examination of the past that will reassess the Chilean colonial endeavour in the Atacama Desert. From the 1930s onwards, a series of environmental critical discourses emerged from post-nitrate melancholy, reshaping Chilean conceptions of the desert, its inhabitants, and the place they have within the national community.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Modern Languages
Funders:	Becas Chile programme from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarollo (ANID)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 September 2024
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2024 10:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/171707

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