Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes by Tara Daly (review)

Into the arena of new materialist reframings of Latin American cultural production steps Tara Daly's Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes, a lively study of material intersections between elements, bodies, and languages in a variety of twentieth-century texts, visual works, and artistic activisms from Peru and Bolivia. Taking as its animating impulse the well-known scene in José María Arguedas's Los ríos profundos (1958), in which child protagonist Ernesto lays his hands on an Incan wall in Cuzco and is rewarded with a physical intuition of the rock's living spirit, Beyond Human investigates the ways in which a series of writers and visual artists take up the materials that make up their environment to probe the relation between biological, mineral, terrestrial, and even cosmological matter—to examine the human's inscription in a network of relations underpinning the Andean concept of buen vivir. Drawing upon contemporary Indigenous and Latin American, decolonial and feminist theorists, and putting them in conversation with writers and artists across the century, Daly explores configurations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in works that determinedly inhabit what the author, following Donna Haraway, calls "natureculture." The result is a vibrant revisioning of some well-known writers from the Andean region (César Vallejo, José María Arguedas), and an illuminating attention to writers and artists past and present who are still too little-known (poet Magda Portal; visual artists Alejandra Dorado and Julieta Paredes).

Two of the animating terms behind Daly's approach are corazonar, a neologism which stitches reason to affect and insists on thinking in relation and as collaboration; and pensandear, a practice of thinking while walking through a landscape that unsettles and surprises our thoughts at each step. Daly invites us to walk and think with her through a series of different yet overlapping times and spaces: the 1920s of César Vallejo, the 1920s through the 60s of Magda Portal, the 1960s of José María Arguedas, the 1990s and 2000s of Julieta Paredes and Alejandra Dorado—the first three in Peru, the latter two in Bolivia. In the case of the writers, Daly foregrounds each one's relation to a particular element—Vallejo and stone, Portal and the sea, Arguedas and air—while, in the case of the artists, she delves into their visual articulation of commonality and difference in a striated social environment. Further animating her approach is the question of assemblage, of prosthetics: the ways in which the individual is or might be augmented by the world around it, be it other humans (Paredes's reaching across lines of race, class, and gender), interspecies alliances (Dorado's collaged portraits), material surroundings (Arguedas's Ernesto), historical affiliations (Portal's elegies for female predecessors) or at the level of the letter (Vallejo's addition of silent h's to words such as hombligo, underlining the common humanity of the ombligo). And, indeed, the humble belly button, which both gestures toward Cuzco—"navel of the world" in Quechua—and brings us back to a shared bodily ground, is at the center of Dorado's 2006 installation Martirio, itself a kind of Aleph for this book: between its photographic portraits of Bolivian inhabitants with their midriffs exposed, its inclusion of a little-known text by Michel Foucault on anagrams, and its invitation to visitors to stamp a combination of letters from the word martirio onto the displayed bodies, the installation, like Daly's book, weaves together text, image, and the participatory body in an active play with our makeup as humans, our makeup as community.

Each of the five chapters of Beyond Human is dedicated to one Andean writer or artist. Chapter one foregrounds the presence of stones—pebbles, monumental Incan rocks, or Western statues—in Vallejo's poetry, where the body is insistently situated in a material environment with which it must come to grips and/or come to blows. As Daly notes, this poetry resolutely ties together terrestrial...