Travels, passages, wanderings: notes on some Latin American film at the turn of the twenty-first century

Abstract

This article aims at mapping out narratives of traveling and the politics of displacement that have emerged in Latin American cinema since the passage from the 20th to the 21st century. Many of the films in this context seem to respond to a current transnational impulse, and they seem to offer a critical position for questions related to transit, human mobility, and their political implications. These films question what is at stake in transit: the political and aesthetic forms that stem from their narratives of displacement; the negotiations that originate from the passages; and the way they invite to affect and put a pressure on borders and frontiers. The political implications are manifold and demand the reconfigurations of the notions of home, nomadism and belonging and a escape from paralyzing and homogenizing reductions of identity in order to trace the singularities that glimmer in the journeys of recent Latin American cinema. In the nomadic trajectory of these films, cinema’s deterritorializing force constructs affiliations and offers a space of imagination for a cartography of Latin America that is expanded in re/deterritorializations where what is shared is an irreducible heterogeinity that emanates from the very force of these singularities.