By engaging Herman Melville, who is from a dominant literary center and imperial nation, and reading him outside of the confines of what is termed here a ‘geopolitics of refusal,’ one practiced and maintained by the US, in the way that the US aligns itself to an Anglo-European cultural and literary tradition, this project aims to connect and develop Melville with a motley crew of scribblers, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Roberto Bolaño, by placing them within the broader literary and geographical context that stresses their influence and affinity to one another, in the way that they artistically and politically refuse those standard, dominant interpretations and discussions of their works, and that reads them together rather than apart within the hemispheric territory that is las Américas.
