Forty days in the sound desert: literature as archive in the works of Valeria Luiselli and Maria Valéria Rezende.

Abstract

In this research, the works Lost Children Archive (2019), by Mexican author Valeria Luselli, and Quarenta Dias (2014), by Brazilian author Maria Valéria Rezende, are compared in order to understand the similarities between the spaces about which these authors write. Considering the border issue (ANZALDÚA, 1987), this study aims to understand which borders these novels have in common and how their characters deal with displacement and its impact on the construction of their identities. Luiselli deals with the border between Mexico and the United States while Rezende writes about the border between the north and south of Brazil, and in both novels there are stories of migrant populations and the traces they leave behind, which are almost always ignored or lost along the way. The hypothesis of this research is that both the novels analyzed build an archive with their literary narratives about groups that cross these borders, mixing historical and fictional discourses. By writing about these migrant groups and bringing them to the center of the narrative, the authors contribute to what Stuart Hall has called "making the invisible visible" (2003), with regard to populations and spaces marked by diaspora. This work therefore draws on the studies of Hartman (2020; 2021) on the archive, Hall (2003) on diaspora and postmodernity, Lugones (2014) and Ballestrin (2017) on decoloniality and feminisms, among other studies that help to compose a panorama of Latin American literature written by women today.