Few literary reputations have traveled such a long and winding road as that of Jorge Luis Borges. After all, his first reception outside Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s saw in him an extraterritorial, as George Steiner called him. Underlying Steiner’s and other interpretations of Borges’s narrative proposed at the time is the notion that the author of Ficciones wrote in isolation from his native country’s history, culture, and literature. Nowadays, however, it is not unusual to see in the author of Ficciones, in Robin Fiddian’s words, “a prototype of postcolonial literature and theory, comparable in historical terms with writers such as James Joyce and Aimé Césaire and prefiguring the theoretical discourse of transnational critics such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak” (189). This 180-degree shift in the understanding of Borges responds partly to a more complete access to his works, but it also reflects changes in political mores, as the revolutionary 1960s have given way to less radical times. Borges’s political evolution that had led him to temporarily support the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s no longer blinds readers to the insights that can be gleaned from his narrative, poems, and essays. This is why, mutatis mutandis, a similar evolution is also evidenced in the trajectory of Borges’s reputation in Latin America, where he is now often considered to be the region’s central literary figure. In fact, in Argentina, he has become a national icon comparable only to Juan Domingo and Evita Perón, both of whom Borges abhorred, or Diego Armando Maradona, whom the football-phobic writer ironically claimed not to have read.

Fiddian’s study is the most sustained attempt at reading Borges from a postcolonial perspective. Although Borges himself attempted to distance himself from his first writing of the 1920s by pruning poems and essays from his collections, Fiddian identifies a continuous concern with topics such as “Occidentalism and post-Occidentalism, Orientalism and post-Orientalism, coloniality and locus of enunciation” that run through his work from relatively early poems, such as “Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires” (1929) to relatively late stories, such as “Brodie’s Report” (1970). As the use of terms such as coloniality, post-Occidentalism, and locus of enunciation imply, Postcolonial Borges does not limit itself to repeating the terminology developed by the celebrated postcolonial trinity of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, but, instead, incorporates the antisystemic ideas of Latin American theorists, such as Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo, into the postcolonial mainstream. Citing Uruguayan scholar Hugo Achúgar, Fiddian argues: “Borges . . . matches the model and category of ‘producers of postcolonial discourses of Latin America’” (189). Fiddian states early in the study that these and other scholars and writers, among whom he obviously includes Borges, “expand the [postcolonial] paradigm to bring it closer to the historical experience and local specificities of Latin American culture(s)” (6).

That much can be gained by reading Borges from a postcolonial perspective is evidenced by Fiddian’s brilliant interpretation of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that details the transformation of our world into Tlön, a fictional world imagined and disseminated by a secret cabal. Although this ficción has been correctly seen as responding to Borges’s preoccupation with the threat of Fascism in the early 1940s, or as an example of his fascination with philosophical and linguistic questions, Fiddian convincingly presents it as “a reflection and exploration of coloniality” (80), that is, of the social, linguistic, and cultural processes characteristic of colonial reorganization.

Fiddian’s celebration of Borges as an exemplary postcolonial writer refuses, however, to take into account the problems raised by the Argentine writer’s political evolution and its possible influence on his works. As previously stated, Borges grew progressively disenchanted with democracy—a position reflected in “La fiesta del monstruo” (“The Feast of the Monster”) co-written in 1947 with his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, and, perhaps, in the canonical story “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941)—and, on occasion, even celebrated imperialism, as in his sonnet “Texas” (1961). Another weakness of the study is that in addition to privileging Anglo-American studies of Borges, the majority of Latin American critics studied are ensconced in US and European academia. With exceptions, such as that of Beatriz Sarlo, Latin American critics living in the region are generally excluded from Fiddian’s consideration.