Abordajes y aproximaciones: Ensayos sobre literatura peruana del siglo XX (1950–2001) (review)

When it comes to the representative Peruvian authors from the second half of the twentieth century, one most surely thinks of Ciro Alegría (1909–67), Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936), José María Arguedas (1911–69), and Alfredo Bryce Echenique (b. 1939). The essays included in Orihuela's volume attempt to expand this list by addressing the previous exclusion of Afro-Peruvian writers and poets. In the first essay, Orihuela makes the case for poetry by Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–92) with an analysis of the poet's simultaneous adoption and questioning of the "décimas de pie forzado", an oral poetic tradition originated by African slaves during Perú's colonial period. Santa Cruz's poetry supervenes the provincial concerns which were always at the heart of traditional "décimas" in favor of national and global themes of social and political protest. According to Orihuela, Santa Cruz's poetry makes debates about issues of race and ethnicity more accessible to an ever larger readership in Perú. Orihuela's second essay analyzes la oralidad negra in Antonio Gálvez Ronceros's (b. 1932) Monólogo desde las tinieblas (1975) with an exploration of black versus non-black oral discourse in the context of unequal and conflicted relationships among Perú's ethnic groups. The third essay in the collection details attempts to allegorize Afro-Peruvian experience and identity through the narrated voice of the semifictional protagonist Candelario Navarro in the pseudo-testimonial novel Canto de sirena (1977) by Gregorio Martínez (b. 1942). Similarly, Orihuela finds that the story of protagonist Tomasón Ballumbrosio in Malambo (2001) by Lucía Charún-Illescas (b. 1950) represents a fictionalized social history of the African diaspora in Perú. Other essays in the collection consider the indigenismo of Carlos E. Zavaleta's (1928–2011) Los ingar (1955), and El Cristo Villenas (1956), as well as poetry by Washington Delgado (1927–2003), Blanca Varela (1926–2009), Enrique Verástegui (b. 1950), and several other poets from the 1960s and 1970s including Carlos Henderson, Luis Hernández, Mirko Lauer, Antonio Cisneros, Reynaldo Naranjo, Manuel Morales, and Juan Ramírez Ruiz.

In the introduction, Orihuela indicates that the collection of essays under review comprises analyses and approaches to a corpus of texts from writers described on the back cover as some of the most representative authors and works from approximately fifty years of contemporary Peruvian literature. However, because Orihuela's project is to call attention to a systematically understudied and underappreciated Afro-Peruvian literary tradition, the essays cannot also be about the most representative authors from this period. Also, because the anthology represents proceedings from scholarly presentations and chapters from books published elsewhere, there seems to be little internal unity to the collection and little in the way of definition of terms or a discussion of the scope of Orihuela's project. In the essays themselves, for example, there is copious reference to "literatura hegemónica" (19), "la tradición canónica" (83), "la poesía culta" (20), etc., but nothing of what might comprise the traditional, national, and cultured corpus that the texts by Santa Cruz, Gálvez Ronceros, Martínez, and Charún-Illescas represent as a counter-tradition. Furthermore, the volume contains unexplained repetitions and double quotations of identical material. For example, a general introduction to Orihuela's proposal for expansion of the canon of Peruvian literature to include Afro-Hispanic titles is repeated with only limited variations in chapters 1 and 2; the same poem by Santa Cruz is reproduced on pages 22 and 30; and a reference to his work in a later essay seems to ignore the fact that the poet had been extensively considered previously. Because each essay has its own separate list of works cited, the volume suffers from bibliographic inconsistency and inaccuracy: several works are cited but not recorded or poorly referenced in the relevant bibliographies, four of the seven online sources in...