The Mercosur fiction: politics and literature in Gabriela Aguerre’s O quarto branco

This paper discusses the viability of speaking of a Southern Cone identity as a Mercosur’s project by analyzing Gabriela Aguerre’s O quarto branco (2019). Departing from the official Mercosur’s discourse about its project of regional cultural integration and in connection with Diego Olstein’s (2017) concept of American Divergence, I argue that the lack of success of Mercosur in creating the notion of a common identity for the Southern Cone is linked to the historical foundation in which lies the creation of the bloc. By reading Aguerre’s novel in view of such divergent framework, I propose that the regional integration that Mercosur longs for can be achieved via literature – specifically through Benedict Anderson’s (2016) concept of print-capitalism, for which novel in print functions as the seed and fabric from which large groups of anonymous peoples can commune and identify. When representing the dualities at play when moving across the Southern Cone borders, Aguerre’s novel both contests and accepts such duality while suggesting that the Mercosur’s common identity is still not a reality, yet achievable in the realm of fiction and communal imagination.