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Writing the “Runa”: Andean Subjectivity in Peruvian Indigenismo (1941-1974) expands the representational limits surrounding the twentieth century Latin American literary movement known as indigenismo. A genre characterized by the representation of rural Andean social reality from urban mestizo political imaginations, indigenismo invents and politicizes figures like el indio – a stylized representation of the rural Andean subject – rather than allowing rural subjects to represent their own experiences in their own terms, languages, and perspectives. Focused on texts produced in Peru concerning rural Andean reality, this project shows how multiple mestizo authors and Indigenous Andean intellectuals produced discursive strategies and narrative practices articulating underrecognized forms of social and/or epistemic resistance. Rather than speaking for Andean peoples and communities, the texts analyzed here speak from submerged Andean knowledges and subjectivities. Specifically, these texts promote the centrality of a relational notion of self, the social participation of nonhuman actors, and non-linear conceptions of time. In short, I am interested in exploring literary articulations of Andean conceptions of personhood, existence, and communication as understood and practiced by runa – a Quechua term designating social subjects who live in accordance with principles of relationality between the human and the other-than-human.
Through depictions of concepts such as ayllu (communal kinship), pacha (the universe as a spatiotemporal totality), and yachay (embodied organic knowledge), mestizo authors like José María Arguedas, Gamaliel Churata, and runa intellectual Saturnino Huillca resist the hegemony of Western subjectivity and promote the visibility of an alternative epistemic ground and subjectivity. To evidence critically unrecognized discursive strategies and literary techniques expressing submerged forms of Andean epistemic resistance, this project develops an interdisciplinary reading practice drawing from literary and cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, theology, and sociology. My literary analysis primarily applies anthropological and sociological discourses to examine how literary works embody Andean principles of relational existence. I emphasize lettered expressions of land-based knowledge grounded in the Andean notion of a totalized existence where everything relates to everything else. Specifically, I show that these texts challenge dominant assumptions regarding indigenismo by writing from runa subjectivity, perspectives on how runa experience, understand, and construct ideas of self in relation to the world. I develop analytical forms which recognize runa as theorist and narrator of their own world. In this way, my project contributes to the field of Spanish and Portuguese literary and cultural studies by applying anthropological and sociological dialogues as literary analysis to further the academic application of Andean thinking as intellectual capital rather than object of study.
This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each exploring a unique and vital category of Andean thinking. The opening chapter contends that the indigenista novel Yawar fiesta (1941) by José María Arguedas promotes the Andean communal structure of ayllu as a site of epistemic rather than sociopolitical resistance. The second chapter considers Gamaliel Churata’s El pez de oro (1957) to argue that the complex collection of experimental myths, prose, poetry, and philosophy invokes the Andean concept of time and space – pacha – to interrogate the foundations of modern Latin American mestizo identity while invoking a reconfiguration toward runa subjectivity. The final chapter analyzes the testimonial narrative Huillca, habla un campesino peruano (1974) to make the case that Andean union organizer Saturnino Huillca expresses an organic knowledge (yachay) to promote a concept of the self and individual knowledge that strives to become “todo un hombre,” or a “complete human.”
By tracing how runa subjectivity challenges dominant literary and epistemic architectures, my project demonstrates that literary indigenismo can be more than space of cultural mediation to become a mode of theorizing grounded in relational, territorial, and pluri-epistemic logics. In foregrounding Andean epistemologies as critical tools, I contribute to broader conversations in Andean studies, Latin American literary criticism, Native American and Indigenous studies, and decolonial thought by insisting that Andean intellectual traditions are neither objects of analysis nor peripheral to theory – they are analysis and theory.