Cannibalising the Argentine Canon in Washington Cucurto's La Revolución de mayo vivida por los negros (2008)

Abstract: Most readings of Washington Cucurto's 1810: la revolución de mayo vivida por los negros (2008) centre around its protagonist, José de San Martín, and the alternative May Revolution led by Africans and Afro-Argentines the novel proposes. This essay focuses instead on the novel's highly intricate transtextual tapestry, analysing its use of intertextualities, paratextualities, and rewritings. It seeks to demonstrate how Cucurto's rewriting of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar can be fruitfully studied through the lens of literary anthropophagy, where the two canonical predecessors are not simply rejected, but incorporated, distorted, and updated in this novel. In turn, this produces a grotesque anti-historical novel which parodies the lofty ambitions of post-dictatorship historical novels in Argentina, tracing the history of racial othering in this country from slavery in colonial times to present-day Buenos Aires.