Borders between reality and illusion in the novel Harraga by Antonio Lozano

Abstract

Orientalism, as a discipline that claims to collect the knowledge that describes the East, was often employed in the service of the West’s expansionist goals. A Eurocentric vision has been constructed which favors Western culture in comparison with others that are classified as inferior, primitive or barbaric. These same stereotypes, that have been repeatedly used to justify imperialism, are present in the Western imagination when we want to describe the immigrant. In the novel Harraga by Antonio Lozano, which we are studying in this article, we describe the situation in which one such immigrant finds himself being torn apart and suffering at the border between the two cultures of Spain and Morocco, symbol of a distance between dream and reality, between paradise and hell.