Seul, São Paulo: Tensions, Othering, and Transcultural Representations in the Novel by Gabriel Mamani Magne

Abstract

This article analyses the novel Seul, São Paulo (2024), by Gabriel Mamani Magne, through the representations of migration, othering, and cultural belonging produced by the trajectory of Tayson Pacsi, a Brazilian man born to Bolivian parents and socialised in São Paulo, who moves to Bolivia and begins to navigate competing regimes of identification. The reading proposes a critical — and methodologically circumscribed — engagement between Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and intra–Latin American cultural hierarchies, without mechanically transposing the West-East axis to the Latin American context. It is argued that the novel exposes a logic of mobile othering through which Tayson is perceived as “Bolivian” in Brazil and “Brazilian” in Bolivia, revealing the instability of the national, racialised, linguistic, and affective boundaries that shape subjects in transit. In dialogue with Said (1978/2007), Foucault (1985/1987, 1978/2018), Bhabha (1994/2018), Rama (1982), Pratt (1992), and Quijano and Ennis (2000), the article examines three dimensions of the novel: the discursive production of the other, the disciplinary apparatuses regulating migrant bodies, and the symbolic collision between Tunupa, McDonald’s, and K-pop as competing forms of cultural imagination. Finally, it is argued that Seul, São Paulo constructs a poetics of Latin American transnationality marked by vulnerability, global desire, persistent coloniality, and cultural resistance. The analysis contributes to cultural studies by bringing together migration, ancestry, language, corporeality, and global consumption within a contemporary Latin American framework.