Mother, Nation, and Self: Poetics of Death and Subjectivity in Julián Herbert¿s Canción de Tumba

© 2018, The Author(s).This chapter explores the relationship between necropolitics and the subjective experience of death in Julián Herbert¿s Canción de Tumba. Verduzco argues that this relationship produces a de-commodification of death that counters the tendency of official discourse to instrumentalize the victims of violence in Mexico. Additionally, Verduzco analyzes the relations of non-correspondence between the experience of the world and its allegedly realistic representation, which motivate the protagonist to refigure his idea of death, of Mexican history and its present situation, of the Cuban Revolution, of the mother figure and, ultimately, of his own masculinity. Through what Cristina Rivera Garza calls necrowriting, namely a form of disappropriation (that is, of deinstrumentalization), Herbert¿s writing becomes a means for restitution of new subjectivities marked by affects and responsibility.