Dispossessed States, migrant idioms and subalternity without frontiers in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo

Abstract

This article aims to focus the peculiar meanings of “end of the world” given by Yuri Herrera’s novel. In its pages the borderland between South and North America becomes a place where the violence of a whole globalized world system gets hopeless and harsher than wherever else. In that scenario, apocalypse seems to be the only way to escape from the colonization of collective thought operated by capitalism as epistemology. The following analysis tries to interpretate “the state of exception”, which is normal feature of the borderland, as a favourable condition for a symbolic alley between the modern migrant and the colonized Latin-American subject. In this way, the migrant’s plural identity shown by Herrera is similar to the hybrid nepantlera subjectivity thought by Gloria Anzaldúa. In both of them the strength interlanguage conveys a transcultural resilience and a political ontological alternative to realism capitalism. The following pages try to verify the feasibility of this kind of existential alternative against capitalism as a word system that feeds itself also with any kind of antihegemonic way of thinking.