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163 CHAPTER SIX Lost in Space: The Geography of Exile It is easy to say: My homeland is where I was born. But you have returned to the place of your birth and found nothing. What does this mean? It is easy to say: My homeland is the land where I shall die. But you can die anywhere. Possibly you will die on the border between two countries. —Mahmoud Darwish (qtd. in Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs) A frequent theme in science fiction is that of the lost community unable to return to its original home. The spaceship-wrecked, although they are dreaming of return, must learn to create an alternative “home.” For instance, the television series Lost in Space revolved around the travails of a family on a space mission that, due to faulty technology, was unable to return home. The extraterrestrial home that the Robinson family created seemed to function fairly well; and this appeased concerns over the integrity of the traditional family that plagued U.S. society during the 1960s. Nevertheless, this recurrent theme in science fiction of a group cut off from its territory and forced to encounter a new land and survive within it has taken many variations over the years as different social fears have mirrored changes in the social and economic construction of society. Like science fiction, much exile literature has also been obsessed with similar issues and these obsessions reflect changing trends in social organization. Perhaps the main difference between these two forms of cultural production is that in science fiction the element of technology is always a central issue: it is either a threat or the means by which the group will survive, will have hope of return, etc. Science fiction is also, always, spatially fantastic: the spaces in which the stories occur are extraordinary and bizarre. What makes this reference to science fiction relevant in the case of the texts studied here is that exiled writers in the latter part of the twentieth century were also affected deeply by changes in technology and spatial relations, particularly with regard to the increasing internationalization of capitalist modes of production. Therefore, technology and its connection to space are issues that affect the construction of an alternative cultural community in the work of Goytisolo, Dorfman, and Peri Rossi—all of whom see technology largely as a threat to 164 Chapter Six the survival of marginalized populations whose spaces of cultural existence are greatly diminishing. In the latter part of the twentieth century, technological innovations occur at an ever-increasing rate, resulting in a corresponding shift in economic relations as well as social-spatial relations. Doreen Massey explains in her article “A Place Called Home” that “[t]he internationalization of capital is a process with old roots, but in recent decades it has increased in intensity and scope and changed in its nature. . . . The most recent, quite newly emerging, form of spatial structure is that of the ‘global corporation ’” (3–4). Massey traces the connections between social-spatial relations and economic modes of production and argues that “each geographical place in the world is being realigned in relation to new global realities” (6). The question, then, is, how does such a shift influence the creation of a cultural community in the writings of exiles ? How does transnational capitalism affect the exile’s notion of home? Where is home for the exile who has left a nation governed by an authoritarian system influenced by the internationalization of capital? How does the exile reconcile nationalism and transnationalism? Further, how does the exiled writer represent the conflict between these two spatial visions of culture? What is most significant about the work of Goytisolo, Dorfman, and Peri Rossi, is that, faced with the choice between two cultural theories which appear to represent polar opposites, they choose to represent the dialectics and intersections between these positions rather than favoring only one view. As in the case of these writers’ representations of nation, language, and time, the spaces of their work are extremely complex. For Goytisolo, the best example of a complex textual space is Juan sin tierra, where the reader travels to many lands and many eras through the imagination of a narrator confined in a room. Dorfman’s The Last Song of Manuel Sendero is spatially complicated by the distinction between “Inside” and “Outside”—spatial referents that do not refer strictly to space but rather to the distinction between timeless myth and historical fiction. In the case...

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