This book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of the enigmatic Peruvian anthropologist and creative writer, Jose Maria Arguedas. Not only the first book-length study on this important Latin American writer in English, this study also gives us a new way to read Latin American indigenista and neo-indigenista writing, by insisting on linking a reading of gender and gendered categories in Arguedian narrative with a reading of race and ethnicity. Lambright asserts that it is through reading the role and trajectory of the feminine in Arguedian narrative that we can best understand the author's national vision. Lambright's analysis also identifies and theorizes a less-studied subject capable of understanding, mediating, and expressing white, mestizo, and indigenous cultures.Using theories of gender, race, nationness, and radical geography, Lambright shows how Arguedian narrative creates new mappings of Peru that contest dominant understandings of the same, and how the hybrid intellectual moves among spaces and national subjects that resist and provide alternatives to an oppressive dominant culture.
Anne Lambright is an Associate Professor of Modern Language and Literatures at Trinity College in Hartford.