Transcontinental Literature: Gabriel García Márquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince

Chapter 1 examines forms of ‘transcontinental literature’ produced by encounters with the Orient in Colombian literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Analysing links to the Arab world in Gabriel García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981) and Héctor Abad Faciolince’s Oriente empieza en El Cairo (The Orient Begins in Cairo, 2002), this chapter argues that they offer forms of ‘transcontinental literature’ that involve movement and connections along peripheral or semi-peripheral circuits. The two works are unique examples that offer a new perspective on Arab Latin American ties. García Márquez’s novel Crónica de una muerte anunciada draws upon a history of Arab migration to Latin America and Latin American Orientalism, while Abad’s travelogue-novel Oriente empieza en El Cairo offers a Latin American traveller’s voyage en Orient. This chapter argues that the cultural encounters in Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Oriente empieza en El Cairo show multi-directional routes between Latin America and the Arab world from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.