Migration and national identity in “No hay nadie allá afuera”, by Alberto Fuguet

Abstract

“No hay nadie allá afuera”, a short story by the Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet, written in 1987, confronts the geographical and symbolic movements of two migrant characters who leave Chile to live in New York. This article seeks to examine the identity tensions and provocations shaped in dialogue with globalizing communication flows. This allows for an analysis of the meanings of Fuguet’s contraposition to the narrative project of magical realism, revisiting debates about the familiar and the foreign in Latin American literature. The text also discusses, based on Josefina Ludmer’s (2010) observations on post-autonomous literatures, the role of the migrant in the formation of national identities by occupying an enunciative place inside/outside their community, emphasizing that, despite being expressed in the local language, the work conveys a profound sense of anti-nationalism. Ludmer’s contributions also help us consider the contamination of literary narrative by other artistic fields, especially cinematographic aesthetics.