| I examine a corpus of literary and audiovisual narratives, in both fictional and documentary forms, that revolve around the 1982 war between Argentina and Great Britain for sovereignty over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. My analysis takes into account, among others, texts by Rodolfo Fogwill, Carlos Gamerro, Jorge Stamadianos, Martin Kohan, Rodrigo Fresan, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Jorge Luis Borges, and films such as Tristan Bauer's Blessed By Fire and Jose Luis Marques' Fuckland.;Most of the fictions produced over the last twenty-five years have been successful in eluding the nationalist prerogatives and the idea of the just cause that permeate political discourses, testimonies or historical essays, and have managed to pose complex responses to the questions of the war's aftermath. I examine the conflict of the Falklands utilizing Michel Foucault's idea of biopower and Giorgio Agamben's contributions and reformulations on this subject. I also analyze it in the context of Karl Von Clausewitz's theory of war and the most recent attempts to reconsider the role of war on the global map of international relations by Paul Virilio, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri.;The fictions of Malvinas/Falklands propose the impossibility of narrating an epic of this conflict by telling stories of survival, mocking the nationalist prerogatives and dismantling the very idea of national identity. At the same time, these fictions are pervaded by the weight of the father-State law and they represent a predominantly masculine universe. Epic is the world of the elderly, the ancestors, the fathers, and many of the fictions analyzed here turn to narratives of impossible or problematic paternities. I argue that by questioning the father-State law, these fictions question the validity of the epic narrative as well.;As an epilog, this work also includes a travel chronicle of the researcher to the origin of her object of study. In this journey, the fictional space, created from imagination, is confronted with a personal, intimate narrative, in the physical space of the Falkland Islands. |
