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 José Carlos Mariátegui and are
subsequently elaborated in the literary works of César Vallejo and José
MaríaArguedas. 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 nations 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 González Prada and ClorindaMatto 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 Mariáteguis 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
César Vallejos materialist poetics progressively extend the nationalist
destiny and social realist aesthetic avowed by Mariátegui 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 José MaríaArguedas 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
