Rethinking Community from Peru: The Political Philosophy of José Maria Arguedas by Irina Alexandra Feldman (review)

Fifty years have passed since the publication, in 1964, of José María Arguedas’s Todas las sangres, and it seems a strange fact that the critical reception has produced but two monographs to address the intractable nature of the characters, argument, and vision forwarded by the sprawling novel (which has not been translated to English, but is normally rendered as All the Bloods, a title as unwieldy as its subject matter). Todas las sangres is many things: a European-style naturalist novel transplanted to fit, uncomfortably, a Peruvian reality; a highly allegorical story of the mining industry’s spiritual desecration of a townspeople that resembles César Vallejo’s El tungsteno as much as Zola’s Germinal; an essaying out, in real-time dialogue, of unreconcilable differences between indigenous and non-indigenous Peruvians and domestic and international venture capitalists; an interpretation of cultural evolution in the mid-twentieth century as the denaturing process of “cholification”; and a struggle between industrial determinism and the expansion of the frame of indigenous consciousness. Like Arguedas’s other novels, it is a choral ode of Quechua syntax and mindset; both Ángel Rama’s description of Los ríos profundos (1957) as an “opera of the poor” and Martin Lienhard’s interpretation of El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971) as avant-gardist perhaps better suit Todas las sangres. It resists interpretation; many critics gloss over or elide this novel on their way from Arguedas’s earlier work to his flashier, later, no less resistant work.

It is with relief, then, that Andeanists will welcome Irina Alexandra Feldman’s Rethinking Community from Peru, which is a reexamination of Arguedas’s philosophical affiliation through a careful exegesis of Todas las sangres. As only Melisa Moore has done before her, in the monograph En la encrucijada: las ciencias sociales y la novela en el Perú (2003), Feldman shows us that Todas las sangres, which she calls “a Dostoyevskian drama” (22), is an essential point on the critical path of Arguedas’s more commonly addressed works. Moore clarified the shift Arguedas made from his anthropological documentation to his literary examination of Peruvian reality; Feldman traces Arguedas’s politics and poiesis with those of the policy and rhetoric of other thinkers of indigeneity such as Bolivian president Evo Morales—as she signals it, “putting Arguedean theorizations in the framework of political thought from the twentieth and the twenty-first century” (14). Feldman thus continues the spirit of Arguedas’s ever-expanding narrative frames.

Feldman’s approach to Todas las sangres as the confluence of “all the politics” of the present era is guided by Walter Benjamin’s concept of illumination—“that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to someone singled out by history at a moment of danger”—and posits Arguedas as a chosen synthesizer of community. Her lens of European political theory—from Benjamin to Derrida and Žižek—seems an appropriate methodological choice given the internationalist frame of the novel, in which identity politics inform and depend on multinational economic interests.

The first chapter is an analysis of statist and individual sovereignty in which Feldman, using Agamben and Habermas as guides in the concept of the illusory trappings of authority, argues that Don Bruno Aragón, the landowning neocolonial figurehead of the company town San Pedro de Lahuaymarca, is a “kingly” character whose sovereign authority is backed by God. Recalling Andean tellurism and transculturation, one might ask, “whose God?” The answer, which appears to be “his own,” highlights the failure of the state to preclude multiple, contradictory authorities at the local level. Indeed, part of the chaos of Todas las sangres derives from the novel’s acknowledgement of the varayok’s, who control the indigenous neighborhoods, or ayllus, as irreconcilable with the authority that capital gives figures such as Bruno. Feldman explores Brian Millstein’s principle of internal sovereignty and Carl Schmitt’s idea of the enemy to...