Illuminations – serie

Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism explores the central role of narrative journalism in the formation of national identities in Latin America, and the concomitant role the genre had in the consolidation of the idea of Latin America as a supra-national entity. This work discusses the impact that the form had in the creation of an original Latin American literature during six historical moments. Beginning in the 1840s and ending in the 1970s, Calvi connects the evolution of literary journalism with the consolidation of Latin America’s literary sphere, the professional practice of journalism, the development of the modern mass media, and the establishment of nation-states in the region.

The Failure of Latin America is a collection of John Beverley’s previously published essays and pairs them with new material that reflects on questions of post-colonialism and equality within the context of receding continental socialism. Beverley sees an impasse within both the academic postcolonial project and the Bolivarian idea of Latin America. The Pink Tide may have failed to permanently reshape Latin America, but in its failure there remains the possibility of an alternative modernity not bound to global capitalism. Beverley proposes that equality, modified by the postcolonial legacy, is a particularly Latin American possibility that can break the impasse and redefine Latin-Americanism.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño’s constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño’s texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.

Translated by Robert WeisTravelers from Europe, North, and South America often perceive Mexico as a mythical place onto which they project their own cultures’ desires, fears, and anxieties. Gómez argues that Mexico’s role in these narratives was not passive and that the environment, peoples, ruins, political revolutions, and economy of Mexico were fundamental to the configuration of modern Western art and science. This project studies the images of Mexico and the ways they were contested by travelers of different national origins and trained in varied disciplines from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It starts with Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist whose fame sprang from his trip to Mexico and Latin America, and ends with Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean novelist whose work defines Mexico as an “oasis of horror.” In between, there are archaeologists, photographers, war correspondents, educators, writers, and artists for whom the trip to Mexico represented a rite of passage, a turning point in their intellectual biographies, their scientific disciplines, and their artistic practices.

Cinema can both reflect the world as it is and offer escape from it. In Modernity at the Movies, Camila Gatica Mizala explores the ideas of reflection versus escapism and examines how modes of understanding the current moment emerged through the practice of going to the movies in Santiago and Buenos Aires between 1915 and 1945. Using cinema and variety magazines published in both cities, she analyzes the technology, architecture, attendance, behavior, language, censorship, and overall experience of cinema-going. Gatica Mizala brings together the perception and reception of cinema as a modern art form, shifting the focus from the production of films to the experience of the audience when viewing them. By focusing on the audience instead of the films, this study effectively articulates the ways that cinema, as a modern activity, was incorporated into everyday life and discuss what it meant to be modern in early- to mid-century Latin America.

The Other Border Wars: Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture questions bordering as an organizing principle of culture, conflict, and politics. Shannon Dowd argues that Central and South American border conflicts such as the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932–1935); the Soccer War, between El Salvador and Honduras (1969); and the Falklands/Malvinas War, between Argentina and the United Kingdom (1982); can be considered as stasis, meaning civil strife, rather than polemos, meaning international war. Through analyses of literature, film, and theater, Dowd shows that border conflict is entwined with domestic strife, reinforced by stagnant geographical lines, and magnified under globalization. Deploying a capacious theory of stasis to question modern sovereignty and bordering, Dowd examines border zones from the outbreak of hostilities to the present, highlighting the lasting legacies of enclosure and violence. The Other Border Wars asks readers to consider how cultural expression challenges the purported fixity of Latin American borders, and even the very idea of bordering.

Winner, 2024 Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs PrizeThe Argentine capital is largely perceived as a middle-class space. Yet in reality, urban poverty and precarious settlements are defining features of the city. Agnese Codebò investigates how slums have produced culture as well as their representation in literature and the visual arts from the 1950s to the present. Looking at government-led urban projects, as well as novels, artworks, films, militant magazines, poems, and music, she tells the story of how villas miseria have mattered culturally and socially as spaces that produce new aesthetics, cultural trends, and social alliances, while offering a vantage point to understand the city and its problems. Slums represent a heterogeneous urban space, and Codebò makes the case for their relevance in Argentine culture, demonstrates the need to rethink spaces of production, and develops a new premise for a decolonial approach to Argentine cultural production.

Guantánamo sits at the center of two of the most vexing issues of US policy of the past century: relations with Cuba and the Global War on Terror. It is a contested, extralegal space. In A New No-Man’s-Land, Esther Whitfield explores a multilingual archive of materials produced both at the US naval base and in neighboring Cuban communities and proposes an understanding of Guantánamo as a coherent borderland region, where experiences of isolation are opportunities to find common ground. She analyzes poetry, art, memoirs, and documentary films produced on both sides of the border. Authors and artists include prisoners, guards, linguists, chaplains, lawyers, and journalists, as well as Cuban artists and dissidents. Their work reveals surprising similarities: limited access to power and self-representation, mobility restricted by geography if not captivity, and immersion in political languages that have ascribed them rigid roles. Read together, the work of these disparate communities traces networks that extend among individuals in the Guantánamo region, inward to Cuba, and outward to the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

In The Return of the Contemporary, Nicolás Campisi combines the fields of post-dictatorship studies and environmental humanities to analyze Latin American cultural production in the neoliberal age. Each chapter pairs two authors from different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean who create a common vocabulary in which to frame the various crises of the region’s present and recent past, such as climate change, forced migration, the collapse of state institutions, and the afterlives of slavery. By situating his argument at the intersection of ecocritical and environmental humanities, affect studies, and the politics of memory and postmemory, Campisi presents new comparative methods to show how Latin America's neoliberal crisis prompted significant changes in how the novel as a form imagines a different future.

Vicente Lecuna examines an array of fictions surrounding Parque Central, a high-rise development conceived and built by the Venezuelan government as a key component of a modernization and urban renewal project. He classifies these fictions into two types: modeling and remodeling. Modeling fictions reflect an inaugural, festive, utopian nature and herald a better future that would abolish the chaotic urban past and allow a new middle class to thrive under modern, clean, orderly, and republican conditions. By contrast, remodeling fictions recast the complex as dark, sinister, contaminated, dangerous, and dirty. Lecuna argues that the Venezuelan state was behind the modeling fictions, while the later remodeling fictions emerged from an empty space that opened during the 1980s, a period that followed oil industry collapse, rising foreign debt, currency devaluation, and mass population exodus. The state gradually abandoned its functions, thereby introducing a long period of stagnation, unemployment, deregulation, and the rise of an informal economy, setting the stage for authoritarian takeover.

Is photography a Eurocentric practice that others its subjects? In Exposing the Nation, Matthias Pfaller makes the case with a review of a national historiography of photography and images produced in Chile over the course of a century. There are multiple photographies, and they have a variety of uses: science, politics, tourism, family traditions, ethnology, art. They appear in a diverse array of media: government albums, family albums, mass-produced postcards, exhibition prints, scientific records, and published books. Pfaller demonstrates the versatility of photography on the one hand, and the ways in which the national paradigm and modern historiography influenced the production and reception of photographic images on the other. It becomes clear that “national photography” is not a genre of its own, manifest solely in specific discourses. Rather, the nation, photography, and history are meta-discourses that pervade the very idea of Chile as represented through photography and the photographic image.

The novel emerged in lockstep with the nation-state, serving as the cultural counterpart to political form in the modern era. However, these dynamics are unraveling as the raison d’être of the contemporary state veers from its people to the neoliberal market. In Novel Distortions, Tamara L. Mitchell analyzes recent (1996–2019) Mexican and Central American fiction and theorizes this emergent epoch through the lens of postnationalism, which describes the altered but still active role of the patriarchal nation-state in society and culture, as well as the way in which novelistic form inscribes and is a symptom of these changes. Within this context, Mitchell examines narrative fiction that mobilizes a postnational aesthetics to illuminate the distortionary effects of neoliberalism and state violence on modern literary and political forms. As Mexico and Central America confront this new reality, this corpus dramatizes the state’s incapacity to guarantee the security of its people and territory. At the same time, the works’ postnational aesthetics lend imaginative definition to forms of relationality, care, and storytelling that defy the individuality and exclusion fomented by emergent neoliberal logic.

Every nation in the Americas—from indigenous Peru to revolutionary Cuba—has been touched by the cultural and musical impact of rock. Rockin\u2019 Las Am\u00e9ricas is the first book to explore the production, dissemination, and consumption of rock music throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Brazil, the Andes, and the Southern Cone as well as among Latinos in the United States.The contributors include experts in music, history, literature, culture, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practicing rockeros and rockeras. The multidisciplinary, transnational, and comparative perspectives they bring to the topic serve to address a broad range of fundamental questions about rock in Latin and Latino America, including: Why did rock become such a controversial cultural force in the region? In what ways has rock served as a medium for expressing national identities? How are unique questions of race, class, and gender inscribed in Latin American rock? What makes Latin American rock Latin American? Rockin\u2019 Las Am\u00e9ricas is an essential book for anyone who hopes to understand the complexities of Latin American culture today.

The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s in novels, travel writing, journalism, and poetry, and presents them in a new light as formulators of modern Western culture and precursors of global culture. Particular focus is placed on the work of Roberto Arlt and M-rio de Andrade as exemplars of the movement. Fernando J. Rosenberg provides a theoretical historiography of Latin American literature and the role that modernity and avant-gardism played in it. He finds significant parallels between the cultural battles of the interwar years in Latin America and current debates over the role of the peripheral nation-state within the culture of globalization. Rosenberg establishes that the Latin American avant-garde evolved on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with the European movements, critiquing modernity itself and developing a global geopolitical awareness. In the process these writers created a bridge between postcolonial and postmodern culture, forming a distinct movement that continues its influence today.

The Tom-raho, a subgroup of the Ishir (Chamacoco) of Paraguay, are one of the few remaining indigenous populations who have managed to keep both their language and spiritual beliefs intact. They have lived for many years in a remote region of the Gran Chaco, having limited contact with European or Latin American cultures. The survival of the Tom-raho has been tenuous at best; at the time of this writing there were only eighty-seven surviving members. Ticio Escobar, who lived extensively among the Tom-raho, draws on his acquired knowledge of Ishir beliefs to confront them with his own Western ideology, and records a unique dialogue between cultures that counters traditional anthropological interpretation. The Curse of Nemur-- which is part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology—offers us a view of the world from an entirely new perspective, that of the Ishir. We acquire deep insights into their powerful and enigmatic narrative myths, which find expression in the forms of body painting, feather decoration, dream songs, shamanism, and ritual. Through dramatic photographs, native drawings, extensive examination of color and its importance in Ishir art, and Escobar’s lucid observation, The Curse of Nemur illuminates the seamless connection of religious practice and art in Ishir culture. It offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other,” and in so doing, causes us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, belief, and Native American culture.

The Optic of the State traces the production of nationalist imaginaries through the public visual representation of modern state formation in Brazil and Argentina. As Jens Andermann reveals, the foundational visions of national heritage, territory, and social and ethnic composition were conceived and implemented, but also disputed and contested, in a complex interplay between government, cultural, and scientific institutions and actors, as a means of propagating political agendas and power throughout the emerging states.The purpose of these imaginaries was to vindicate the political upheavals of the recent past and secure the viability of the newly independent states through a sense of historic destiny and inevitable evolution. The careful presentation of artifacts and spectacles was also aimed abroad in order to win the favor of European imperial powers and thereby acquire a competitive place in the nascent global economy of the late nineteenth century.The Optic of the State offers a fascinating critique of the visual aspects of national mythology. It exposes how scientific and cultural institutions inscribed the state-form in time and space, thus presenting historical processes as natural \u201cgivens.\u201d

Hosam Aboul-Ela provides a startlingly original perspective on Faulkner, examining his work in the transnational context of the \u201cGlobal South\u201d: the geopolitical and economic dynamics of the post-Reconstruction period that link the American South to the larger colonial tradition. Other South thus raises new questions as to the scope and attitude of Faulkner's project, positioning Faulkner's work as an inherent critique of colonialism and emphasizing a more specific conceptualization of coloniality.Engaging with ideas and thinkers from the former colonies, Aboul-Ela draws on an understanding of economics, social structures, and the colonial/neocolonial status of the Third World, stepping outside the preconceptions of current postcolonial studies to offer a fresh perspective on our shared literary heritage and a new look at an iconic literary figure.

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a \u201cnew humanism,\u201d one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Buenos Aires erupted from its colonial past as a city in its own right, expressing a unique and vibrant cultural identity.Intersecting Tango engages the city at this key moment, exploring the sweeping changes of 1900-1930 to capture this culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, \u201chigh\u201d and \u201clow\u201d literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city's defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity. In her interdisciplinary study of urban development and cultural encounters with modernity, Bergero leads the reader through the city's emergence, collecting her investigations around the many economic, social, and gender issues remarkably conveyed by the tango, the defining icon of Buenos Aires. Multifaceted and original, Intersecting Tango is as rich and captivating as the dance itself.

Through theoretical, philosophical, cultural, political, and historical analysis, Horacio Legras views the myriad factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. Despite these barriers, Legras reveals a handful of contemporary authors who have attempted in earnest to present marginalized voices to the Western world. His deep and insightful analysis of key works by novelists Juan Jos\u00e9 Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose Mar\u00eda Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, provides a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice and the confines of the literary medium. What emerges is an intricate discussion of the clash and subjugation of cultures and the tragedy of a lost worldview.

In The Andes Imagined, Jorge Coronado not only examines but also recasts the indigenismo movement of the early 1900s. Coronado departs from the common critical conception of indigenismo as rooted in novels and short stories, and instead analyzes an expansive range of work in poetry, essays, letters, newspaper writing, and photography. He uses this evidence to show how the movement's artists and intellectuals mobilize the figure of the Indian to address larger questions about becoming modern, and he focuses on the contradictions at the heart of indigenismo as a cultural, social, and political movement. By breaking down these different perspectives, Coronado reveals an underlying current in which intellectuals and artists frequently deployed their indigenous subject in order to imagine new forms of political inclusion. He suggests that these deployments rendered particular variants of modernity and make indigenismo representational practices a privileged site for the examination of the region's cultural negotiation of modernization. His analysis reveals a paradox whereby the un-modern indio becomes the symbol for the modern itself.The Andes Imagined offers an original and broadly based engagement with indigenismo and its intellectual contributions, both in relation to early twentieth-century Andean thought and to larger questions of theorizing modernity.

On December 22, 1997, forty-five unarmed members of the indigenous organization Las Abejas (The Bees) were massacred during a prayer meeting in the village of Acteal, Mexico. The members of Las Abejas, who are pacifists, pledged their support to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a primarily indigenous group that has declared war on the state of Mexico. The massacre has been attributed to a paramilitary group composed of ordinary citizens acting on their own, although eyewitnesses claim the attack was planned ahead of time and that the Mexican government was complicit.In Without History, Jos\u00e9 Rabasa contrasts indigenous accounts of the Acteal massacre and other events with state attempts to frame the past, control subaltern populations, and legitimatize its own authority. Rabasa offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives and develops the concept of a communal temporality that is not limited by time, but rather exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. Due to a disconnection between indigenous and state accounts as well as the lack of archival materials (many of which were destroyed by missionaries), the indigenous remain outside of, or without, history, according to most of Western discourse. The continued practice of redefining native history perpetuates the subalternization of that history, and maintains the specter of fabrication over reality.Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, as well as contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity. For Rabasa, these methods and the continuum of ancient indigenous consciousness are evidenced in present day events such as the Zapatista insurrection.

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colonyÆs residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro (\u201cThe Counselor\u201d), who promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to their system of government, which had only recently been freed from monarchy. Estimates of the death toll at Canudos range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. In her study, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of \u201cother\u201d voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da CunhaÆs Os Sert\u00f5es, which has become the defining—and nearly exclusive—account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been \u201csentenced\u201d to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of CunhaÆs contemporaries, Afonso Arinos and Manoel Ben\u00edcio, in order to strip away political agendas. She also seeks to place the inhabitants and events of Canudos within the realm of \u201ceverydayness\u201d by recalling aspects of daily life that have been left out of official histories.Johnson analyzes the role of intellectuals in the process of culture and state formation and the ensuing sublimation of subaltern histories and populations. She echoes recent scholarship that posits subalternity as the product of discourse that must be disputed in order to recover cultural identities and offers a view of Canudos and postcolonial Latin America as a place to think from, not about.

In May of 1976, documentary filmmaker and proclaimed socialist Raymundo Gleyzer mysteriously disappeared in Buenos Aires. Like many political activists, Gleyzer was the target of a brutalizing military junta that had recently assumed power. Amazingly, within a few decades, leftist filmmakers would be celebrated as intellectual vanguards in this same city.In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in ArgentinaÆs volatile transition to democracy. She shows how, during different regimes, the state moved to either inhibit or facilitate film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies the film industry employed to comply with, or circumvent these regulations. Stites Mor divides the transition period into three distinct generations, each defined by a major political event and the reactions to these events in film. The first generation began with the failed civil uprising in C\u00f3rdoba in 1969, and ended with the 1976 military takeover. During military rule, repressive censorship spurred underground exhibitions, and allied filmmakers with the Peronist left and radical activists. The second generation arose after the return of civilian rule in 1983. Buenos Aires became the center for state-level cultural programs that included filmmakers in debates over human rights and collective memory campaigns. In 1989, a third generation of filmmaking emerged, with new genres such as cine piquetero (picketer cinema) that portrayed a variety of social movements and brought them into the public eye. By the new millennium, Argentine filmmakers had gained the attention and financial support of international humanitarian and film industry organizations. In this captivating study, Stites Mor examines how populist movements, political actors, filmmakers, government, and industry institutions all became deeply enmeshed in the project of ArgentinaÆs transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.

An intellectual tour de force from one of today’s leading critics of Latin American literature and culture, The Corpus Delicti (The Body of Crime) is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the central role of crime in literature, in life, and in the life of the nation. Drawing her examples from canonical texts, popular novels, newspaper serials, and more, Josefina Ludmer captures the wide range of Argentine crime stories and detective fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She offers more than a mere genre study, examining the relationship of crime and punishment to the formation of law, the body, and the modern state, exposing the ways in which literature—both high art and mass culture—can help construct, not just represent, social reality. Covering a dazzling array of primary sources, social history, and cultural theory, this provocative work is also a structural masterpiece, challenging readers as it charts new roles for text and notes. In this redefined dialogue, the notes variously offer alternate views, additional insights, and, often, parallel commentaries. Glen Close’s stylish translation captures the energy of Ludmer’s prose—simultaneously subtle and daring—for English-language readers.

Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture. The Metamorphosis of Heads explores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings--weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor. The Metamorphosis of Heads acknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.

Described in his lifetime as “mad,” “a dreamer,” “quixotic,” and “a lunatic,” Pedro Bohorques is one of the most fascinating personalities of Spanish colonial America. A common man from an ordinary Andalusian family, he sought his fortune in the new world as a Renaissance adventurer. Smitten with the idea of the mythical cities of gold, Bohorques led a series of expeditions into the jungles of Peru searching for the paradise of El Dorado. Having mastered the Quechua language of the countryside, he presented himself as a descendent of Inca royalty and quickly rose to power as a king among the Calchaquíes of Tucumán. He was later arrested and executed by the crown for his participation in a peasant revolt against Spanish rule. In Spanish King of the Incas, Ana María Lorandi examines Bohorques as a character whose vision, triumphs, and struggles are a reflection of his seventeenth-century colonial world. In this thoroughly engaging ethnohistory, Lorandi brings to light the many political and cultural forces of the time. The status of the Inca high nobility changed dramatically after the Spanish conquest, as native populations were subjugated by the ruling class. Utopian ideals of new cities of riches such as El Dorado prevailed in the public imagination alongside a desire to restore an idealized historic past. As the Middle Ages gave way to the new belief systems of the Renaissance, ingenuousness about mythical creatures became strong, and personal success was measured by the performance of heroic deeds and the attainment of kingdoms. Charismatic and bold, Pedro Bohorques flourished in the ambiguous margins of this society full of transition and conflict. Ann de León's artful translation preserves both the colorful details of the story and the clarity of expression in Lorandi's complex analyses.

Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–1969) was a highly conflicted figure. As a mestizo, both European and Quechua blood ran through his veins and into his cosmology and writing. Arguedas’s Marxist influences and ethnographic work placed him in direct contact with the subalterns he would champion in his stories. His exposés of the conflicts between Indians and creoles, and workers and elites were severely criticized by his contemporaries, who sought homogeneity in the nation-building project of Peru.In Rethinking Community from Peru, Irina Alexandra Feldman examines the deep political connotations and current relevance of Arguedas’s fiction to the Andean region. Looking principally to his most ambitious and controversial work, All the Bloods, Feldman analyzes Arguedas’s conceptions of community, political subjectivity, sovereignty, juridical norm, popular actions, and revolutionary change. She deconstructs his particular use of language, a mix of Quechua and Spanish, as a vehicle to express the political dualities in the Andes. As Feldman shows, Arguedas’s characters become ideological speakers and the narrator’s voice is often absent, allowing for multiple viewpoints and a powerful realism. Feldman examines Arguedas’s other novels to augment her theorizations, and grounds her analysis in a dialogue with political philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Álvaro García-Linera, among others.In the current political climate, Feldman views the promise of Arguedas’s vision in light of Evo Morales’s election and the Bolivian plurality project recognizing indigenous autonomy. She juxtaposes the Bolivian situation with that of Peru, where comparatively limited progress has been made towards constitutional recognition of the indigenous groups. As Feldman demonstrates, the prophetic relevance of Arguedas’s constructs lie in their recognition of the sovereignty of all ethnic groups and their coexistence in the modern democratic nation-state, in a system of heterogeneity through autonomy—not homogeneity through suppression. Tragically for Arguedas, it was a philosophy he could not reconcile with the politics of his day, or from his position within Peruvian society.