Daniel Alarcón’s 2007 novel Lost City Radio positions post-civil-conflict Peru in relation to episodes of violence from across the globe by deploying two opposing cartographic impulses. First, the unnamed fictional nation of the novel shares historical, topographical, and sociopolitical traits with modern Peru. At the same time, the text refuses tidy association with Peru, principally by folding violent conflicts from a host of geopolitical spaces into the fictional nation via journalistic ekphrasis. This results in a unique geopoetics that serves to catalyze the localized reality of postconflict Peru as a means of interrogating the efficacy of human rights discourse in the neoliberal era on a global scale and bringing into focus the current inequity of responses to the global refugee crisis.
En la novela Lost City Radio (2007) de Daniel Alarcón, el Perú de la posguerra se representa en relación con episodios de violencia de diversos países a través de dos impulsos cartográficos contradictorios. La nación ficticia (sin nombre) comparte rasgos históricos, topográficos y sociopolíticos con el Perú contemporáneo. A la vez, la novela no permite asociación simple con el Perú al incorporar conflictos violentos en diversos espacios geopolíticos a través de la écfrasis periodística. El resultado es una geopoética única que sirve para catalizar la realidad local del Perú de la posguerra con fin de interrogar la eficacia del discurso de los derechos humanos en la época neoliberal a escala global y puntualizar la crisis global de refugiados.
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