Tourists, locals, and migrants: Linked mobilities in short fiction by dominican writer aurora arias

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2015

Abstract

The article examines the representation of different types of movers and non-movers in Aurora Arias’s short story collection Emoticons (2007) against the backdrop of the dramatic rise of tourism and out-migration in the Dominican Republic since the 1990s. Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of glocalization as well as his metaphors of mobility provide a point of departure for analysis of what the short stories “Emoticons” and “Bachata” contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the local and the global, and the role of mobility in how we conceptualize these categories. I consider ways in which (im)mobility is gendered and racialized and how patterns of mobility between developed/developing countries are represented and critiqued. I argue that the relationships between movers and non-movers under globalization both mirror and diverge from those established under colonialism and neo-colonialism. Through multiple perspectives on the encounters among locals, tourists, and expatriates Arias’s narratives suggest alternatives to the (im)mobile subjectivities that tend to reinforce global inequalities.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

First Page

81

Last Page

96

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS