Postcolonial Borges

This work considers geopolitical and postcolonial themes in a range of writings by Jorge Luis Borges, analysing the development of a postcolonial sensibility in works such as ‘Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires’, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, and ‘Brodie’s Report’. It examines Borges’s treatment of national and regional identity and of East–West relations in several essays and poems, contained, for example, in Other Inquisitions, The Self and the Other, and Seven Nights. The theoretical concepts of ‘coloniality’ and ‘Occidentalism’ shed new light on several works by Borges, who acquires a sharper political profile than previously acknowledged. The book pays special attention to Oriental subjects in Borges’s works of the 1970s and 1980s, where their treatment is bound up with a critique of Occidental values and assumptions. Classified by some commentators as a precursor of postcolonialism, Borges emerges as a prototype of the postcolonial intellectual exemplified by James Joyce, Aimé Césaire, and Edward Said. From a regional perspective, his repertoire of geopolitical and historical concerns resonates with those of Leopoldo Zea, Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Galeano, and Joaquín Torres, amongst others, who illustrate different strands and kinds of Latin American postcolonialism(s) of the mid- to late twentieth century. At the same time, essential differences in respect of political and artistic temperament mark Borges out as a postcolonial intellectual and creative writer who is unquestionably sui generis.