Locating the mestizo intellectual race and class in Mariátegui, Arguedas and Gutiérrez

Abstract

This study examines the work of three Peruvian writers in order to analyse the ways in which they approach the theme of national identity in Peru. Jose Carlos Mariategui, Jose Maria Arguedas and Miguel Gutierrez all engage with national, continental and global movements in literature and politics in their writing. They also share an interest in promoting a subaltern identity that is grounded in questions of race and class, and are active during moments of crisis -1920s, 1960s and 1990s – when constructions of national identity have been questioned in Peru. They respectively elaborate national identity in Peru within the context of colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial politics to correspond to these moments of crisis and their interactions with local and external influences. Through an analysis of the works of Mariategui, Arguedas and Gutierrez, this thesis highlights the specificity of the Andean region that cannot be collapsed into more general theories of Latin American postcolonialism or Marxism. Peru's particular colonial history and post-independence development have seen the continued salience of race and class in local constructions of national identity. On a sub-national basis, gender also persistently disrupts dichotomous notions of national identity to reflect Peru's historical experience. Underlying this study is a tension between essentialist and post-structuralist approaches to identity among the three authors studied. This thesis shows that despite a movement towards globalisation, the concept of region and nation is still pertinent in contemporary Peruvian literature. All three writers operate in a framework that combines fixed and fluid definitions of identity in what is argued is an open dialectic of identity that is not framed by a binary relationship but retains a politics of difference in order to articulate the specific regional identity. Their work reveals in different ways how the local seeks to maintain its alterity, intentionally and unintentionally, both because of the persistence of categories such as race and class that are defined in a plural way and because of the interaction of the local with external influences.