Fiction. In English translation. José María Arguedas is one of the few Latin American authors who loved and described his natural surroundings, and he ranks among the greatest writers of any time and place. He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Yawar Fiesta describes the social relations between Indians, mestizos, and whites in the Peruvian highland town of Puquio in the early twentieth century. Each group’s reaction to the national government’s attempt to suppress the traditional Indian-style bullfight reflects their attitude toward social change more generally. Included with the text of the novel is Arguedas’ anthropological essay “Puquio: A Culture in the Process of Change,” written eighteen years after Yawar Fiesta. The article emphasizes the social changes in the village that resulted from the road construction described in the novel. While Arguedas’ poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary, making translation into other languages extremely difficult. Frances Horning Barraclough has met the challenge and produced an excellent work that remains faithful to the author’s use of language to reflect with lived experience of Peruvian Indians.

A contribution to the study of Peruvian anthropologist and creative writer, Jose Maria Arguedas. It asserts that it is through reading the role and trajectory of the feminine in Arguedian narrative that we can best understand the author's national vision.

The only recent English-language work on Spanish-American indigenismo from a literary perspective, Estelle Tarica’s work shows how modern Mexican and Andean discourses about the relationship between Indians and non-Indians create a unique literary aesthetic that is instrumental in defining the experience of mestizo nationalism. Engaging with narratives by Jess Lara, Jos Mara Arguedas, and Rosario Castellanos, among other thinkers, Tarica explores the rhetorical and ideological aspects of interethnic affinity and connection. In her examination, she demonstrates that these connections posed a challenge to existing racial hierarchies in Spanish America by celebrating a new kind of national self at the same time that they contributed to new forms of subjection and discrimination. Going beyond debates about the relative merits of indigenismo and mestizaje, Tarica puts forward a new perspective on indigenista literature and modern mestizo identities by revealing how these ideologies are symptomatic of the dilemmas of national subject formation. The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism offers insight into the contemporary resurgence and importance of indigenista discourses in Latin America. Estelle Tarica is associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at the University of California, Berkeley.

Explores debates over Peru's modernisation and cultural identity in post-1940 literature, exploring how writers and others confronted challenges of language, style, and narrative form in their attempt to write across their nation's cultural divisions. This book examines the relationship between Peru's white elite and its indigenous majority.

Imagining Modernity in the Andes is an interdisciplinary work that deals with the intersection of projects of modernity with constructions of race and ethnicity in the Andes. This book focuses initially on Indigenismo, attempting to recuperate the intellectual energy of writers and artists from the twenties who rewrote political and cultural discourse in an irreversible manner, and concludes with a consideration of the new configurations of indigeneity that are emerging today not only in the Andes but across the globe. The multidisciplinary work of José Marìa Arguedas occupies a privileged place in this study and his anthropological work is analyzed in the context of an ideological climate. In addition to considering sociological and anthropological accounts, Archibald examines representations of urbanization and social informality by four Peruvian novelists, pointing to the prevalence of the troupe of the grotesque as a metaphor for the unmanageability associated with cities of the South. Finally, Imagining Modernity in the Andes analyzes the implications of the emergence of new visual media in a culture context long defined by the oral-textual divide, and considers the continued relevance of the concept of transculturation in a transnational and post-literary context.

Featuring twenty-five key essays from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (Traves/sia), this book surveys the most influential themes and concepts, as well as scouring some of the polemics and controversies, which have marked the field over the last quarter of a century since the Journal's foundation in 1992. Emerging at a moment of crisis of revolutionary narratives, and at the onset of neoliberal economics and emergent narcopolitics, the cultural studies impetus in Latin America was part of an attempted intellectual reconstruction of the (centre-) left in terms of civil society, and the articulation of social movements and agencies, thinking beyond the verticalist constructions from previous decades. This collection maps these developments from the now classical discussions of the ‘cultural turn’ to more recent responses to the challenges of biopolitics, affect theory, posthegemony and ecocriticism. It also addresses novel political constellations including resurgent national-popular or eco-nativist and indigenous agencies. Framed by a critical introduction from the editors, this volume is both a celebration of influential essays published over twenty five years of the Journal and a representative overview of the field in its multiple ramifications, entrenchments and exchanges.