From Civilization to Barbarism in El ciudadano ilustre : The Return of a Latin American Paradigm?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to have an in-depth look at how the nineteenth-century paradigm of civilización y barbarie , predominant in Latin America, is represented in the film El ciudadano ilustre/ The Distinguished Citizen (2016), an Argentine film directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat. A fictional account of an Argentine writer’s life after winning the Nobel Prize, it has a highly ambiguous ending. I argue that the film establishes a dialogic link with classics of Latin American literature such as Esteban Echeverría’s ‘El Matadero’ (1871) and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘El Sur’ (1953), and Facundo by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, laying bare the unresolved tension between civilización and barbarie in contemporary Argentina and broader Latin American society. A close analysis of El ciudadano ilustre shows that, at least in Latin America, oppositional concepts have all but died, thus challenging the postmodern trend of dissolving them along with other supposedly outdated binarisms (such as urban v. rural, centre v. periphery.). Simultaneously, the film uses metafiction as a postmodern strategy to deal critically with the dichotomy.