Moments of Revolutionary Transformation in "No Soy Un Aculturado."

Order Description A SHORT PIECE OF THE PROJECT'S PROPOSAL IS BELOW: In this work, I have elected to examine José María Arguedas’s speech, "No Soy Un Aculturado," as emblematic of the Marxist turmoil of twentieth century Peru and a microcosm of socio-political issues that concern populations of developing countries throughout the Americas not only during the years he wrote, but now as well. Furthermore, Arguedas’s work has had a greater impact sociologically than the writings of other more internationally recognized authors from his region. In order to study the Arguedean take on the concept of a revolutionary process, one must formulate several compelling questions. What is the ancestral relation between Arguedas, previous, and subsequent developments in the Marxist and Andean versions of struggle? What is the nature of “revolution” in Arguedas speech? What are its tasks, its political subjects, and its antagonists in the speech? The constants that determine Arguedean thought about radical social change in all of his novelistic production and link it to the concept of social upheaval elaborated by José Carlos Mariátegui, and then inquire how the concept of this struggle is modified and refined in Arguedas’ last novel, "El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo." As I will try to show, this acceptance speech is characterized by the increasing internationalist focus of the “emancipatory struggle,” and by the increasing ambiguity in the definition of the revolutionary subject. Arguedas strove to reconcile his identification with both the coast and the Andes, and originally believed in a decolonial project that could achieve justice for indigenous Peru. Considered within the Latin American socialist and Marxist tradition(s), José María Arguedas emerges as a visionary figure that tends a conceptual bridge between the early Latin American Marxists and the Leftist thought developed in the Andes [Ecuador, Bolivia included] at the beginning of the 21st century. What is more, although the concept of class struggle, for instance, seems worn out, and other concepts such as hegemony or antagonism are more current in a present theoretical dialogue, it is important to see the continuity and genealogy between these concepts that seem so new, and the Marxian concept of antagonism that still informs them. To speak of Arguedas as a Marxist thinker is to counter this forgetfulness. Significantly, the figure of Arguedas has acquired a renewed dimension in Peru after the decades of Shining Path violence. The intellectuals of the Peruvian left of the 2000s have mined Arguedas’ thought for readings that would “save” socialism from the contamination by violence and the deaths of 80,000 people that occurred, at least partially, under the banner of socialist struggle.