The Image of the Indio in a Non-Representative Economy

The Image of the Indio in a Non-Representative EconomyMeditations on Peruvian Marxism Omar Rivera Introduction The two general aims of this essay are: 1. To inquire into the relation between politics and aesthetics from the perspective of a Peruvian, postcolonial context. This essay attempts to uncover something unique about this relation that defines a singular politico-aesthetic sensibility that is found in Latin American art and thought, a sensibility motivated by postcolonial historical and political contexts. Mariátegui’s study of the task of Peruvian literature, and of the role of the image of the indio, the native Andean, in this literature, gives insight into this politico-aesthetic sensibility. 2. To begin to sketch a singularly indigenous mode of political praxis and agency on the basis of Mariátegui’s interpretation of Cesar Vallejo’s poetry. [End Page 131] This sketch shows that within Peruvian literature there is an affirmative, nonideological understanding of the political role of indigenous peoples that resists the presentation of them as defined by victimization, alienation, and nostalgia.1 Instead, indigenous peoples appear here as a possible example of political praxis beyond economic, political, and cultural imperialism.2 The explicit and specific aim of this essay is to engage both Vargas Llosa’s and Mariátegui’s work in order to find in their differences a way to uncover the image of the indio in Peruvian literature as a politico/aesthetic phenomenon. Following Mariátegui—and against Vargas Llosa—this essay shows that through the image of the indio Peruvian literature can translate into political praxis without falling prey to ideological constructs. The image of the indio in Peruvian literature appears here as vital to the induction of indigenous peoples and postcolonial subjects into the space of political praxis that colonization usurped from them.3 The essay has two parts. The first part is an interpretation of Vargas Llosa’s claim that the image of the indio in Peruvian literature is a useless political, ideological artifact that results in both bad politics and misconceived literature. This part shows that, despite Vargas Llosa’s efforts to erase the image of the indio, he fails to neutralize this image as a politico/aesthetic phenomenon. This failure appears here as a provocation: to think this image as presenting and enabling the transition of Peruvian postcolonial subjects toward a sense of political agency beyond the lineage of colonization and imperialism. This provocation suggests a nonideological function of the image the indio in Peruvian history. The second part of this essay follows the provocation of the first part. In order to do this, we have to understand to what extent Mariátegui was not simply a Marxist ideologue that imposed a foreign conceptual structure upon Peruvian indigenous reality. In order to do this, we will rely on the work of Alberto Flores Galindo. Thinking Mariátegui beyond ideology, as proposing a “practical hermeneutics,” the second part engages a general analysis of the task of literature in the context of Peruvian postcolonial history in Mariátegui’s view. This part ends by uncovering the way in which Mariátegui’s [End Page 132] interpretation of Vallejo as enacting the task of Peruvian literature delineates a mode of political praxis latent in the image of the indio, a praxis that remains a possibility for postcolonial, marginalized, subjects beyond the rule of colonization—a praxis that interrupts the lineage of colonization without repeating its political forms and sensibilities.4 Part One: The Impossibility of Erasing the Indio 1. Vargas Llosa’s Archaic Utopia. In La Utopia Arcaica, Vargas Llosa critiques the Peruvian literary movement indigenismo and the novelist José María Arguedas in particular.5 Indigenismo portrays a romantic image of the indios—the native Andean peoples—in an attempt to envision the future of Peruvian society and politics as a return to a precolonial, indigenous state. This return would be, in Vargas Llosa’s words, a return to an Andean society that is: “. . . traditional, communal, magico religious, quechua-speaking, guardian to collectivist and atavistic values . . .” (Vargas Llosa, 1996, 335). Vargas Llosa understands indigenismo to be defined by the ideology of an archaic utopia. In his view, this utopia is (1) a

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Database · Epistemology · Indigenous · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Sensibility · Sociology · Computer Science · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Law · Literary and Cultural Studies · Philosophy

• Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality

  Jose Carlos Mariategui, Marjory Urquidi•Seven Interpretive Essays on…•1971

  Add to list