Sacilotto Daniel - Universality And Utopia The 20th Century Indigenista Peruvian Tradition - Hardcover

Binding: Hardcover
Description: Universality and Utopia explores the intersection between philosophical universalism and revolutionary politics in twentieth - century Peruvian indigenista literature. It traces a tradition of thought whose basic tenets originate in the philosophical works of Jos Carlos Mari tegui and are subsequently elaborated in the literary works of C sar Vallejo and Jos Mar a Arguedas. My central thesis is that more than a regionalist or provincialist literature that describes the social reality and historic oppression of the rural Indian since colonial times the socialist indigenismo is continuous with the invention of a utopian imaginary for a project of alternative modernity through which urban intellectuals artists and activists conceived of a national future beyond that of capitalist modernization. Above all such a future would traverse the prescient division between the urban mestizo and the Indian and finally the lingering disparity between the nation's Western and native heritage. In doing so indigenista writers did not only adapt the tenets of socialist philosophy and avant - garde aesthetics to describe their unique social realities and thinking of the possibility of an emancipatory political practice; they also interrogated the foundations of European Marxism expressing various figurations of the emancipatory process to come and different models for the new revolutionary subjectivity that would aid this transition. Rejecting assimilation into Western modernization within the urban milieu (acculturation ) under liberal capitalism imagined by liberal writers such as Manuel Gonz lez Prada and Clorinda Matto de Turner in the late nineteenth century I argue that the twentieth - century socialist indigenista tradition anticipated a bilateral process of appropriation and mediation between the rural Indian and mestizo integrating indigenous as well as Western cultural and economic forms. In the first chapter I assess Mari tegui's heterodox Peruvian socialism tracing the articulation of a nascentindigenista aesthetics to an emancipatory politics as part of an active philosophy driven by what the author names creative antagonism. In the second chapter I explore how C sar Vallejo's materialist poetics progressively extend the nationalist destiny and social realist aesthetic avowed by Mari tegui onto an internationalist and geopolitical horizon as part of an aesthetics of transmutation that coincides with a plea for humanity as a whole. In the third chapter I trace how Jos Mar a Arguedas novels attempt to reconcile what he named the magical and rational conceptions of the world extending the ideal of a transcultural mediation between the rural Indian and urban mestizo to conceive of a new collectivist and cooperativist ethics of labor for - itself informed by his anthropological and ethnographic research. In the fourth chapter I propose a general retrospective of the aims and limitations of the ideals guiding this tradition considering the development of Peruvian indigenista literature after Arguedas interrogating the legacy and prospects of emancipatory politics in response to the limits of neoliberal capitalism and the crisis of democracy in Latin America today.
Title: Universality And Utopia The 20th Century Indigenista Peruvian Tradition
Author(s): Sacilotto Daniel
Publisher: Anthem Press
Barcode: 9781839986871
Pages: 214 Pages
Publication Date: 2/14/2023
Series: Anthem Studies in Latin American Literature and Culture
Category: Literary Studies: Post-Colonial Literature