Dissertation

Por qué me has matado?: Sovereignty, authority and law in José María Arguedas' “Todas las sangres”

Feldman, Irina Alexandra

2007

Overview

This dissertation approaches José María Arguedas' important and controversial novel Todas las sangres (Peru, 1965) from the perspective of political philosophy and cultural studies. I read Todas las sangres as a field of theoretical exploration where sovereignties of different collectivities—that of the “modern” Peruvian State, the indigenous communities and the hacienda—clash and dialogue. The first chapter is dedicated to the revision of literature about the novel. The second chapter engages Jean-Luc Nancy's and Álvaro García Linera's theorizations on the conceptual bond between metaphysics of subjectivity, death and community. Through these theoretical prisms I approach the textual construction of the above-mentioned collectivities. The third chapter touches on the topic of post-colonial heterogeneous condition of the Peruvian society, which brings about a crisis of hegemony (as theorized by Ernesto Laclau), and whose result is a clash of multiple sovereignties. Giorgio Agamben's and Carl Schmitt's theorizations illuminate the notion of sovereignty as treated in this dissertation, and Jürgen Habermas' study of the public sphere was helpful to understand the consequences of multiple sovereignties. In the final chapter, the issue of “judicial heterogeneity” is addressed. In Todas las sangres each sovereignty (the state, the indigenous community) claims the right to use its own legal system. Thus, the State feels contested as the Quechua ayllu claims its rights to certain degree of cultural and legal autonomy and thus questions the State's sovereign right and monopoly on violence. Bolivian scholars Xavier Albó and Enrique Mier Cueto who have studied the phenomenon of the justicia comunitaria, the tradition of indigenous law, helped me understand this aspect of the textual representation of Peruvian society. Finally, the study dialogues with Jacques Derrida's and Walter Benjamin's reflections on the violent origins of any law. The dissertation comments on the dark beginnings of democracy in countries like Peru, where the colonial fissures made the consolidation of hegemony of any kind a process that required blood of many (subaltern) victims, as the State's monopoly on violence was often imposed not by legal or discursive processes but by mere exercise of domination.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Latin American literature
• ISBN: 054961835X, 9780549618355