| Description |
Global migrations of the past century have forced many cultural groups to confront issues ranging from urban isolation to acculturated absorption. Major population shifts have resulted in the relocation of peoples of divergent backgrounds to convergent and crowded environs, and in the process, have forced individuals to grapple with their own identity. Peruvian author and ethno-anthropologist José María Arguedas personifies that reality. Indeed, I argue that Arguedas's fictional writings anticipated those dramatic changes and their consequences, and are emblematic of the cultural turmoil of 20th century Peru, which itself is a microcosm of issues that concern many Third World populations in the postmodern era worldwide. While some critics argue that Arguedas's style rejects postmodern traits, I make the case that his work is transitional, moving from the modern to the postmodern and that from the outset his fiction contains integral structures that decidedly fall into the latter category. Furthermore, I disagree with other critics' evaluations of Arguedas's work as simplistic and utopic, and argue that it demonstrates a complexity of vision that presages emerging events. Components of that vision include his creation of a new hybrid language, his expression of complex hybrid identity constructions among the subaltern and the hegemonic in rural performance and societal interaction, and magical real elements of autochthonous cosmovision that are widespread today. The internalized tensions resulting from hybridities of heritage that impede self-actualization are central to understanding his novels, informing the fractured postmodern personality. Further, I argue that Arguedas uses his personal experience of incarceration to reveal the prison as another fragmenting location of both the abject and the sublime. His final and most controversial work reveals postmodern society as a chaotic melding of modern-day capitalistic greed churning in today's urban vortex combined with ancient mythical performance as a comedic yet assertive language of cultural resistance, with the individual identity caught precipitously in the middle. Through his work, Arguedas is a prophetic signifier of the hybrid world with which we struggle today. |
