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An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is the lyrical storytelling of fieldwork conducted in Neuland, a Mennonite colony in Paraguay’s Boquerón department, and Cayim ô Clim, the neighboring Nivaclé settlement. The author was conceived in Neuland in 1990, and returned in 2013 and 2016. This multi-sequentially read book shifts in genre from ekphrastic description of 30-second films shot in Asunción, Filadelfia, and Neuland; to a short story collection inspired by metonymically translated Nivaklé myths; and finally, a novella that mythologizes the life of a third generation Mennonite woman. The hypertextual structure that linked to films and translations has been extracted to leave only her narratives which attempt to render three other kinds of realities—Nivaclé, Paraguayan, and Mennonite ways of being made over—and her own. This unweaving technique was inspired by Ñandutí—the unraveling of threads from a fabric to create a pattern that resembles a spider’s web.
Published: Nov 03, 2020
|Est. Pages: 206
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