Emigración y testimonio en Cosmofobia, de Lucía Etxebarria.

What is it about?

My paper analyses the role that transcribed and slightly fictionalized testimonies by immigrants to Spain who settled in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés in Madrid play in Lucía Etxebarria’s ensemble novel Cosmofobia (2007). I contrast my analyses of these manipulated testimonies with those gathered by Carmen Romero Bachiller, a sociologist who specializes in immigration, in her work, Articulaciones identitarias (2006). Although the inclusion of real-life testimonies in novels can be a risky narrative strategy, collecting first-hand testimonies from immigrants is a good approach to avoiding the fetishization of the other in the encounter between immigrants and autochthonous citizens in the way that Sara Ahmed theorizes ethical encounters. In my paper, from the framework of Ahmed’s philosophy of ‘strange encounters’, and with the help of Saskia Sassen’s global cities and Mireille Rosello’s stereotypes, I propose that in the case of Cosmofobia, the problem lies in the national perspective of the author. The novel is more about the generation of the democratic Transition and its distanced perspective than about new relations in Spain in a globalized social sphere.

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