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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Universality and Utopia in 20th Century Peruvian Indigenismo A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Daniel Sacilotto 2018 © Copyright by Daniel Sacilotto 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Universality and Utopia in 20th Century Peruvian Indigenismo By Daniel Sacilotto Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Kenneth Reinhard, Co-Chair Professor Efraín Kristal, Co-Chair My dissertation explores the intersection between philosophical and literary universalism in Latin America, tracing its configuration within the 20th Century Peruvian socialist indigenista tradition, following from the work of José Carlos Mariátegui, and elaborated in the literary works of César Vallejo and José María Arguedas. Departing from conventional accounts that interpret indigenismo as part of a regionalist literature seeking to describe and vindicate the rural Indian in particular, I argue that Peruvian indigenista literature formed part of a historical sequence through which urban mestizo intellectuals sought to imagine a future for Peruvian society as a whole. Going beyond the destiny of acculturation imagined by liberal writers, such as Manuel Gonzales Prada, in the late 19th Century, I show how the socialist indigenista tradition imagined a bilateral process of appropriation and mediation between the rural indian and mestizo, integrating pre-Hispanic, as well as Western cultural and economic forms, so as to give shape to a process of alternate modernity apposite to the Andean world. In doing so, indigenista authors interrogated the foundations of European Marxism in light of the distinctiveness of Peruvian society and its history, expressing ever more nuanced figurations of the emancipatory process and the forms of its revolutionary agency. Following an assessment of Mariátegui‘s heterodox ‗Peruvian socialism‘ and its proposed articulation between a nascent indigenista aesthetics and an emancipatory politics informed by rural cooperativism under a process of ‗creative antagonism‘ (Chapter I), I trace the way in which César Vallejo‘s ‗materialist poetics‘ (Chapter II) and José María Arguedas‘ novels (Chapter III) extend the ideal of a productive mediation between the rural indian and mestizo to produce new figures of the revolutionary subject and the destiny of the socialist dream. I finally propose a general retrospective of the aims and limitations of the aspirations guiding the socialist indigenista tradition, considering the development of Peruvian indigenismo literature after Arguedas and until today (Chapter IV). ii The dissertation of Daniel Sacilotto is approved. John A. McCumber Nathan Brown Kenneth Reinhard, Committee Chair Efraín Kristal, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iii Table of Contents Introduction – The Problematic of Indigenismo and the Socialist Imaginary I- The Dream of Social Restoration II- The Liberal Precursor to Socialist Indigenismo in the Late 19th Century III- José Carlos Mariátegui‘s Socialist Critique of Liberalism: From Acculturation to Revolution IV- A Roadmap: From Creative Antagonism to Democratic Crisis Chapter I – José Carlos Mariátegui: The Dialectics of Revision, Integration, and Appropriation Introduction- Indigenismo, Socialism, and Philosophy I- Between Representation and Revolution a) Indigenismo as a Literary Category in Mariátegui‘s Dialectics b) An Active Philosophy: Creative Antagonism, Myth and Faith II- Toward a Peruvian Socialism: The Indian Proletariat Subject and the Coming Nation Chapter II – From Existential Despair to Collective Jubilation: César Vallejo‟s Materialist Poetics Introduction- Vallejo‘s Universalist Poetics and the Question of Indigenismo I- Vallejo‘s Heretic Defiance: The Three Nostalgias and the Subject of Loss a) The Nostalgia of Absence b) The Nostalgia for What is to Come II- A Materialist Reduction of the Subject: Hermetism, Sexuality and Temporality in Trilce a) The Material Bases of Experience b) The Collective Subject to Come: Materiality, Animality, History III- The Paris Years – Vallejo‘s Aesthetics of Transmutation in El Arte y la Revolución IV- The National and the Global: El Tungsteno and the Militant Indian Proletariat Subject V- The Time of Harvest: The Glorification of Labor and the Global Proletariat Subject in Poemas Humanos VI- Nostalgia for the Future: The World of Justice and the Generic Human Subject Chapter III – The Light Within the World: José María Arguedas and the Limits of Transculturation Introduction- The Limits of the Appropriative Dream I- The Tasks of the Intellectual: Between Regionalism and Universalism II- The Rehabilitation of Culture Against Economicism III- Transculturation and Heterogeneity: Synthesis and Difference iv IV- Form and Content: Literary Transculturation and the Search for a New Language V- The Revolutionary Indian Subject in the ―Narratives of the Village‖: Agua VI- The Collective Indigenous Subject in the ―Narratives of the Big Towns‖: Yawar Fiesta VII- The Post-Indian Transcultural Subject: Todas las Sangres VIII- The Limits of Transculturation and the Post-Cultural Subject: The Foxes Chapter IV – The Contemporary Scene: The Future of Indigenismo and the Collapse of the Integrative Dream After Arguedas Introduction- A Brief Retrospective: Indigenismo After Arguedas I- The Collapse of the Revolutionary Ideal in Literary Indigenismo after Arguedas II- The Ethical Turn and Democratic Materialism III- Beyond The Ethical Turn: The Critique of Violence and the Politics of Creation IV- The Collapse of Socialist Productivism and Proletariat Subject V- The Crisis of Democracy and the Peruvian Situation Today Appendix I – On the Critical Responses to Vallejo‟s Trilce Appendix II – On Mario Vargas Llosa‟s Critique of the “Archaic Utopia” List of Figures Diagram I Diagram 1.1 Diagram 1.2 Diagram 3.1 Diagram 3.2 Diagram 4.1 v Vita / Biographical Sketch My work is centered in the fields of Latin American literature, contemporary critical theory, and contemporary European and Anglo-American philosophy. I am a Research Fellow and MA from the University of California at Los Angeles. My dissertation project is titled ―Universality and Utopia in 20th Century Peruvian Indigenismo‖. It explores the intersection between philosophical and literary universalism in Latin America, tracing its configuration within the 20th Century Peruvian socialist indigenista tradition following from the works of José Carlos Mariátegui, and elaborated in the literary works of César Vallejo and José María Arguedas. I am also a BA in Philosophy from Cornell University. Below is a select list of my publications: Book Projects - Saving the Noumenon: An Essay on the Foundations of Ontology A critical examination the rise of the so-called ‗ontological turn‘ in 20th Century Continental philosophy, and a proposal for a new kind of rationalist epistemology and naturalist metaphysics, inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, and Ray Brassier. Articles / Book Chapters - ―A Thought Disincarnate: What Does it Mean to Think?‖ in Glass Bead Journal, Site 1: Logic Gate, the Politics of the Artifactual Mind. 2018. - ―Puncturing the Circle of Correlation‖, in The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux: Analytic and Continental Kantianism, edited by Fabio Girony, Routledge, September 2017. -―Artificial Life and Intelligence‖, in For Machine Use Only: Contemplation on Algorithmic Epistemology, edited by Mohamed Salemy, Published by &&& and The New Center for Research and Practice, New York, 2016. - ―Finitude‖, ―Death‖, ―Subjectalism‖, in The Meillassoux Dictionary, edited by Peter Gratton, and Paul J. Ennis, Edinburgh University Press, 2015. - "Towards a Materialist Rationalism: Plato, Hegel, Badiou", in International Journal of Badiou Studies, second issue, November 2012. - "Realism and Representation: On the Ontological Turn", in Speculations, volume IV, 2012. - "In Defense of Unfashionable Causes: A Review of Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects", in Speculations, volume III, 2012. vi - INTRODUCTION - The Question of Indigenismo and the Socialist Imaginary I – The Dream of Social Restoration In the broadest possible sense, indigenismo is a literature about the rural Indian written by the urban mestizo, describing the particularities of their traditions and critically addressing the history of its subjugation since colonial times. In this broad sense, indigenismo is constitutively an urban production written with an urban audience in mind, shaped by and responding to the political debates that transpired among city intellectuals and activists1. Its origins can be dated back2, at least, to Narciso Aréstegui‘s 1848 novel El Padre Horán, which narrates the abuses of religious and state authorities in the Peruvian republic since the mid-19th Century, tracing the origins of the social division between the rural Indian and the mestizo to the cultural clash unleashed by the colonial experience3. Toward the turn of the 20th Century, however, indigenismo is commonly dated to the publication of Clorinda Matto de Turner‘s Aves sin Nido in 1889, which although notably influenced by Aréstegui‘s novel, moved away from the aesthetic tenets of Ricardo Palma‘s literary costumbrismo, inspired by the liberal politics and the social realist literary ideal guiding Manuel Gonzales Prada and his so-called ―Literary Circle‖ (Círculo Literario).