Intelectuales y poder. Ensayos en torno a la república de las letras en el Perú e Hispanoamérica (ss. XVI–XX) (review)

Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada, published posthumously in 1984, theorized about the relationship between political power and the power of the written word in the cities and colonies founded in the Iberian New World. This anthology takes up Rama’s lead and examines the interplay between the written discourse of intellectuals and the exercise of political power in Peru. An introduction by Carlos Aguirre and Carmen McEvoy lays out the theoretical objectives of the volume and surveys the content of the articles that follow. Those 18 case studies are less concerned with the history of the ideas articulated by Peruvian intellectuals than in examining the political, social, economic, and cultural context in which the writers lived and acted. The studies constitute what Aguirre and McEvoy call a “sociología histórica” (p. 20).

The first part of the anthology examines intellectuals of the colonial period and the dominance of the royal government and Catholic hierarchy, which acted as patrons for the letrados (men of letters), who in turn were expected to reinforce the state and Church’s hegemony. Pedro Guibovich examines, for instance, the travails experienced by Pedro de Oña, whose Arauco Domado extolled the supposed achievements of his patron, the recently departed Viceroy Marqués de Cañete, but in so doing attacked other members of the colonial elite. Some men of letters placed themselves fully at the service of state power, as is seen in José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido’s article about the operas of Pedro Peralta y Barnuevo. In his analysis of José Eusebio Llano Zapata, an eighteenth-century limeño intellectual, Víctor Peralta Ruiz studies how colonial men of letters created networks for themselves. Over time, Llano Zapata had to develop three groups of patrons for his work. Such networks were not permanent patron-client relationships; time and changing political conditions forced intellectuals to seek new patrons. Bernard Lavallé treats the precarious status of intellectuals in their dealings with colonial powers, especially the viceroys. He concludes that a secondary level of intellectuals probably enjoyed more freedom of thought and expression than did the foremost letrados.

It might be argued, of course, that a colonial man of letters, loyally supporting the political elite, was not really an intellectual, who would instead be a nonconformist, and it was only with the region’s independence that men of letters began to display such nonconformity to an appreciable extent. This is the underlying theme of the volume’s second part. Margarita Garrido traces the activities of Antonio Nariño of Colombia, who tried to make enlightened European thought available to his countrymen and, in 1793, went so far as to translate the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Such activities gave him stature as an intellectual with the arrival of independence. Some early republican men of letters continued to serve the state, as José Raga’s article shows, by helping it compile the data that gave the government a statistical monopoly. Independence also brought non-governmental opportunities for intellectuals, however, with the founding of newspapers, journals, and serial novels, as shown by Ana María Stuven and Marcel Velázquez. A persuasive article by Luis Felipe Villacorta analyzes how one of Peru’s foremost intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Antonio Raimondi, struggled to integrate the Andes into the modern scientific world but found his efforts blocked by the turmoil and cost of Peru’s frequent wars.

The third group of articles focuses particularly on the “Generation of the Centenary,” early twentieth-century figures such as Manuel González Prada, José Carlos Mariátegui, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and others who offered...