Reimagining Plantationocene?s Legacy in Gabriela Cabezón Cámara?s Las aventuras de la China Iron

NOELIA BILLI

Pennsylvania

Congreso; 52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA; 2021

NEMLA; College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo y Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania

Donna Haraway defines the Plantationocene as "a devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor" (2015). As a system of multispecies forced labor, the Plantationocene describes how the modern world has become to be: a racist, colonial, imperialist and capitalist world which has taken the plantation as nomos. One of the most provocative assertions of this diagnosis is that alienation and discipline affects not only human people, but also plants, non-human animals, microbes and even inorganic beings (such as the soil, rivers and rocks). If we turn to the argentinian case with this perspective, we may re-read the so-called argentinian national identity foundational stories, such as José Hernández epic poem Martín Fierro, as the narratives where the argentinian identity is stabilized as that of a brave man (first and outlaw and then a national hero) whose principal task is to erase (materially and symbolically) the indigenous legacy. In a recent novel by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017), this foundational story is radically rewritten. The writer chooses Fierro's female partner (who is abandoned along with their children by the gaucho Fierro when he is forced to enlist in the national army and take part in the conquest and killing of the indigenous land and people) to tell an alternative version to this story. Las aventuras... defies the attempts to discipline beings as well as the stories they can tell: in the novel, la China becomes a part of a fluid community where she and Fierro eventually become a trans-gendered couple whose kin is a nomadic multispecies community which is in a constant migration traveling the Mesopotamian rivers of the area. Throughout this undisciplined world-making story, the "humiliation that any verticality supposes" (La china iron..., 148) ?one of the leit motives of the plantation system?, is transformed into a non-hierarchical humility which, as I will argue, allows to discuss the colonial, racist and extractivist legacy of the plantation system that prevails in Argentina today.