José Carlos Mariátegui and the Time of Myth

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5777101
AutoresJaime Hanneken (Portuguese Army, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen81
Número1
Páginas1-30
Fecha de publicación2012-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCultural Critique (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0882-4371 • E-ISSN: 1460-2458
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cul.2012.0020
OpenAlexW2070452741
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas19

José Carlos Mariátegui and the Time of Myth Jaime Hanneken (bio) In the midst of Latin Americanism's ascending rapprochement with postcolonial theory and criticism, one often sees the ideas of Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) mentioned as a ripe site for new dialogues about the vicissitudes of coloniality beyond the geopolitical, historical, and conceptual lodestars of postcolonial studies.1 In particular, Mariátegui is seen to hold out to the apparatuses of academic postcolonialism a reminder of the priority of thinking colonial relations as locally and historically produced practices: his defense of heterodox Marxism in the experience of uneven development and his insistence on dissolving the universal currency of the modern linear European notion of time both speak directly against postcolonial scholarship's tendency, as Epifanio San Juan summarizes it, to take the "unsynchronized and asymmetrical formation [of the postcolonial world] as the ideal habitat for . . . all those cultural expressions and practices described as hybrid, creolized, syncretic, ambivalent, multiplicitous, and so on, [and fetishizing and reifying them] as permanent, ever-recurring, and ineluctable qualities" (232).2 Given the ample correspondence of Mariátegui's concerns with many of the questions raised in the slow pendular swing in postcolonial cultural studies from wholly discursive theoretical bases to materialist and even ontological critique, it is surprising that the exchanges anticipated at the intersections of Latin Americanism and postcolonial studies during the past ten years have not produced more extensive studies of Mariátegui.3 The absence can be explained in large part, I think, by the vexed legacy of Mariátegui's alliances to vitalist thought, most clearly incarnated in his proposals regarding the indigenous revolutionary myth he saw as the key to an integrated, modern Peruvian nation. For example, it is telling that the most thorough examination [End Page 1] to date of Mariátegui's confluences with the postcolonial reticulate, by Sara Castro-Klarén (134), painstakingly analyzes his heterotemporal rendering of Peruvian citizenship and his prescient awareness of the dialectical entanglement of coloniality and modernity-both essential to creating a "pluritopic" dialogue beyond the North-South bilateral scope that has characterized Latin America's engagement with postcolonial studies-without once mentioning myth. The relative silence surrounding this cornerstone of Mariátegui's thought, especially where it is aligned with assertions of his relevance for postcolonial contexts, can be seen as symptomatic of the broader discomfort of postcolonialism's dominant reading paradigms with the irrational or the religious, betraying a tacit submission that the Mariátegui best suited to reintegrate Marxist Latin American and poststructural metropolitan insights to postcoloniality is a figure that showcases his historical materialist acumen and bears no traces of mysticism. My objective in this essay is to recuperate the other, mystical figure of Mariátegui as the starting point for the conversation heralded above. What I aim to demonstrate is that such an initiative cannot be content to station liberationist writing from Latin America as a corrective to Anglo-American assumptions about the postcolonial, nor more broadly to reinsert Marxist categories of nation, class, and consciousness back into its cardinal vocabulary; rather, an earnest reading of myth forces a revision of the ways both postcolonial studies and Marxism manage, or not, to apprehend those elements that have traditionally inhabited the constitutive outside of philosophy's Cartesian thinking subject, elements that have social significance in the real experience of modernity in many places but are unintelligible to the paradigms charged with understanding it. In their second balance sheet of postcolonialism, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge cite this necessary elision within Marxist and postcolonial criticism of what they call contramodernity (following Homi Bhabha) as a central obstacle to any continued purchase of the term "postcolonial": [A] radical consciousness [of history] is not to be found by adherence to the current narratives of either postcolonialism or Marxism. . . . Only by contemplating itself in the past tense may postcolonialism still continue into the future. The past it needs to accommodate includes a serious engagement with those premodern (and countermodern) tendencies that colonial instrumentalism systematically excised under the sign of the [End Page 2] rational "man." . . . Into the Marxism we believe is foundational to an understanding of

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American Literature Studies