UC Irvine

My study consists of a reading of José María Arguedas’s narrative, from the perspective of Ecocriticism. Whereas indigenista writers such as Enrique López Albújar, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Ciro Alegría represent the Andean world based on the binary civilización/barbarie, Arguedas opts for creating a subjectivity that problematizes what has been named as the historization and normalization of the Andean world. Indeed, Arguedas’s narrative contains traces of what I call the Andean consubstantiality, whose rhizomatic configuration is at odds with the hegemonic project of the literary indigenismo and the Peruvian state. In my opinion, Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos underlines and makes us aware of the destruction of the complex and diverse Andean ecosystems, long before his posthumous work, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo.