'Another way of naming elsewhere': transnational and hemispheric stories by some Canadian and Argentinian authors

Abstract

Transnational and gothic discourses have for some time been paired in critical invocations of the unhomely or spectral legacies of imperialism and globalization. This legacy, which appears in the form of unresolved memory traces and occluded histories resulting from diasporic migration is readily figured as an ostranenie which haunts the characters of some Argentinian and Canadian storytelling from within and without. The writers of these stories are first or second generation migrants who developed their writing career in the host country. This essay tries to analyse these transnational stories which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance in Canadian and Argentinian writing, for different political and traumatic reasons, in their cinematic deployment of the homeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors’ memories.