Extinction, Rememory and the Deadly Work of Capitalism in Valeria Luiselli’s “Lost Children Archive”

Abstract

Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive, attends to the inherited repressions, silences, and erasures around the official chronicling of the current migrant and refugee crisis at the Southwestern border between the US and Mexico by developing in a very original narrative format a literary space of personal “re-memory” that encompasses that specific crisis and extends to the geopolitical history of the United States. In the novel, fictional and non-fictional references shape an American landscape that appears as the space of both unfinished colonization and incomplete representation. The novel’s project is to make the disappearances it traces readable, by evoking them first and by re-enacting them later, in its twin sections delivered by two different narrators. In inscribing absences from the present and from the past, the novel both delivers several narratives of “lost” children, lost people, lost sounds, lost landscapes and lost species, and interrogates our conceptual preparedness for the prospect of extinction and for the dis-imagination of the future. It does so historically by linking colonial violence to capitalism’s expansion, and formally by highlighting the affective and archival power of writing vis-à-vis digital narrative and the quantification of information.