Literary Siblings, Decoloniality, and Delinking from the State: Reading Moby-Dick at the Open City of Ritoque, Chile

Abstract

New investigations into “critical cosmopolitanism” (Rosenberg) and a “desire for the world” (Siskind) in modern Latin American literature follow a trend in much postmillenial scholarship renegotiating our understandings of cosmopolitanism and world literature. This debate about cosmopolitanism and the global travel of literature has appeared recently, for example, in criticism of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, with many writers focusing on its internationalism and interculturality. One particular mode of investigating such intercultural relations within Moby-Dick has been recently gaining ground: How has Moby-Dick been received outside the United States? Starting from this question, this article focuses on Moby-Dick’s reception in Chile and, more specifically, on its reception by Godofredo Iommi at the Open City of Ritoque: “a utopian community of architects and poets” (Latronico), as well as artists, scientists, and others, on the Pacific coast of Chile. My analysis is therefore situated between the United States and Chile, between Moby-Dick and the Open City. Founded in 1970, the Open City was formed by a group of faculty and students–most notably the Argentinian poet, Godofredo Iommi, and the Chilean architect, Alberto Cruz–from the School of Architecture and Design (EAD) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV). The goal of the Open City was and is to found a space in which poetry, architecture, and urbanism are intimately related; within the City, architecture spatially articulates the mythical grounding for an urban conviviality that is generated through poetic revelation. The theoretical foundation of this group is an avant-garde epic poem, Amereida (1967), that they, along with other poets, philosophers, and artists from across the world, produced between 1965 to 1967 and whose stated purpose was to be “the Aeneid of America”: a founding myth on which to build an American culture and architecture (Jolly and Corea 8). Much of the literary focus of this group, as is made evident in Amereida, is dedicated to an investigation of the formation of a Latin American identity that struggles with the cultural inheritance of Eurocentric coloniality. As such, it should come as no surprise that North American literature receives no