Displaced modernities: Poetry and politics in the Andean avant-garde (Jose Carlos Mariategui, Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Cesar Vallejo, Peru)

This dissertation focuses on the crucial interaction between periphery and center that informed Andean intellectuals' critical and literary responses to the economic and social changes experienced within their region in this century's early decades. Andean vanguardists such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and César Vallejo did not merely appropriate European discourses in their efforts to enter into and engage with the 20 th century. Rather, they provided an index of the places where such imported discourses of the modern broke down in the face of Latin America's startlingly distinct reality. Once exposed, these aporias in the Western discourses of modernity often revealed imperialist designs but, more importantly, they also constituted an opportunity for peripheral intellectuals to layer corrective discourses over hegemonic ones. This move to self-inscription opened up the possibility that autochthonous cultural forms need not be lost in the modern world, but indeed, might help to define it.; To this end, these intellectuals formulated discourses of resistance and recuperation that drew in equal parts from local ideologies such as indigenous utopianism and imported theories like Marxism but refused to either fuse or rank the two. The enunciation of such doubled discourses proved highly resistant to the homogenizing tendency of imperialism because it enabled the buttressing of revolutionary visions with older traditions and so chaperoned the past into the modern period. The three cases studied in this dissertation—the revolutionary indigenism promoted by Peru's José Carlos Mariátegui, the harmonious cityscape that the poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat dreamed of forging from the alien cultures of the sierra and the booming city, and the revitalizing of orality that the poet César Vallejo achieved through a reconfiguration of Spanish Civil War poetry—allow for vigorous critiques of the regions continuing cultural and economic strife in the face of assimilation due to the simple fact that they do not view the modern as antithetical to the autochthonous.