Displaced Modernities: Poetry and Politics in the Andean Avant-Garde

FAIN: FT-51894-03

Jorge Coronado
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

The project, "Displaced Modernities: Poetry and Politics in the Andean Avant-Garde," analyzes the critical response to modernity in Andean literature and criticism during the 20’s and 30’s. My research focuses on the writings of three Peruvian intellectuals--José Carlos Mariátegui, César Vallejo, and Carlos Oquendo de Amat--and examines their simultaneous use of multiple and seemingly opposed discourses in their attempts to articulate models of modernity appropriate to the cultural specificity of the Andes. The simultaneous articulation of often contradictory discourses allowed these figures to remain affiliated with both local ideologies and imported theories, while refusing to either fuse or rank the discourses they utilized.