Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar (review)

The appearance of an English translation of Antonio Cornejo Polar’s seminal Escribir en el aire: ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas provides a wonderful opportunity to reencounter this tremendous literary critic, whose influence on contemporary Latin American criticism is immeasurable, and also to reflect on the continued relevance of this text. The work was first published by the Centro de Estudios Peruanos in 1994, three years before the author’s death, with a second edition appearing in 2003 under the imprint of the Centro de Estudios Literarios “Antonio Cornejo Polar” (CELACP), an organization founded to honor his legacy as a teacher and scholar. Those readers who have not had sustained access to his thinking until now, with this first translation of a book-length work (some of his articles had been previously translated into English), will find a scholar of impressive erudition whose pluralist sensibilities offer a powerfully compelling perspective on Andean literature.

One question that arises when contemplating a translation concerns market and audience. What kind of new reader can we foresee? To whom will this work be of interest? Jean Franco, in her brief and insightful foreword to the English translation, frames this book as an “initiation” into a realm beyond the Western literary canon. Franco alludes here not only to the peripheral positioning of Latin American literature vis-à-vis European literature and to the desire by many readers to venture out beyond the Western canon; she also highlights, if elliptically, a major theme of Cornejo Polar’s study, namely, the relationship—he calls it a “conflictive dialogue”—between Western and non-Western cultures in the Americas. The newcomer’s initiation to this field will be complicated by the fact that some of the texts that Cornejo discusses in Writing in the Air lack complete published translations into English. This is a not entirely insignificant problem, considering that Cornejo cites liberally from these, forcing his translator, Lynda Jentsch, to fill in substantive gaps with her own translations. But this is perhaps a minor point. Duke University Press, the publisher, is marketing the book less as an introduction to Andean literatures than as a pointed intervention into Latin American cultural criticism, and as the purveyor of a concept—heterogeneity—that only now, in English, will be able to reach a truly global audience, thereby presumably augmenting the value of this concept for all concerned. To my mind, this understanding of Cornejo’s “heterogeneity” runs the risk of reifying it and undermining the spirit of demystification that runs through all his work. In fact, I would urge readers of this work to resist the temptation to be guided by the editorial decision to frame the book as a rebuttal of concepts of hybridity circulating in Latin American cultural criticism. A cynic might wonder if the decision wasn’t guided by Duke’s recent publication of an English translation of Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, the unnamed antagonist in this largely invented polemic that perhaps, not coincidentally, allows the press to market both books at once. Although Cornejo published two late and exceedingly brief articles criticizing Rama’s use of “transculturation” as a metaphor for literature, none of this can be found in Writing in the Air, whose unspoken antagonist is entirely other: the nationalist ideology of mestizaje embraced by the military populists who ruled in 1970s Peru.

Writing in the Air grapples with what Cornejo terms the “destabilizing hybridity of Latin American literature” (4). What makes heterogeneity forceful as a concept is its emphasis on the modifier “destabilizing.” In this, as in his previous work, Cornejo seeks to demonstrate that the continuing legacy of colonial injustice produces a disjuncture within modern Andean nations, which are marked by the “conflictive co...