Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative: Social Conflict and Transculturation

Peru is a nation built on the still extant colonial divide between indigenous peoples and the descendants of their Spanish conquerors, a divide that finds expression in the short stories, novels, and essays by renowned Peruvian writers such as Jose Maria Arguedas and Mario Vargas Llosa. The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative explores debates over Peru's modernisation and cultural identity in post-1940 literature, exploring how Arguedas, Vargas Llosa, and others confronted challenges of language, style, and narrative form in their attempt to write across their nation's cultural divisions. It examines how modernisation affected the relationship between Peru's white elite and its indigenous majority, how historical change stimulated the emergence of new narrative techniques, and how these in turn made possible an understanding of the historical contexts in which they arose. Though Peru is its principal focus, the text engages with current studies of modernity at the postcolonial margins of the Western world by contributing to an understanding of the class and ethnic conflicts generated by rapid modernisation in culturally heterogeneous nations. The Colonial Divide will add to the growing body of critical literature on the ways in which modernity in formerly colonised nations such as Peru is inflected by the enduring legacies of colonialism.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Zen Thought: An Overview; Good and Evil; Salvation as Idolatry; Zen Existentialism; The Mechanisms of Distress; The Five Modes of Thought and the Psychological Conditions for Satori; Freedom -- Total Determinism'; The Egotistical States; The Zen Unconscious; Metaphysical' Distress; Seeing Into One's Own Nature -- The Spectator of the Spectacle; Practical Implications of the Zen Approach to Inner Work; Obedience to the Nature of Things; Emotions and Emotional States; Sensation and Feeling; Pleasure, Pain and the Affective Response; The Rider and the Horse; The Primordial Error or Original Sin'; The Immediate Presence of Satori; The Mind's Passivity and the Disintegration of Our Energy; Concerning Discipline'; Compensations; Inner Alchemy; Humility; Metaphysical Insights; The Validity of Intellect in the Domain of Metaphysics; The Noumenal Domain; The Creative Principle; The Nature of God; Are Phenomena Real?; Why Does God Manifest Himself?; Two Ways of Thinking About the Cosmos; The Genesis of Creation; The Purusha-Prakriti Duality; Divine Indifference; The Law of Interconditioning; Our Total Conditioning as Human Beings; The Role of the Demiurge; God and Man; A Critique of Systematic Methods; Theoretical Understanding at the Intellectual Level and Lived Knowledge'; Dying in order to be Re-born; The Search for Happiness; Duality and Dualism: The Possibility of Perfect Humility; Good and Evil; The Conditions which Precede Realisation; How To Bring About a Progressive Reduction in One's Pride; Benoit's Technique of Timeless Realisation; Buddha and the Intuition of the Universal; Glossary of Terms; Index.

About the Author :
Misha Kokotovic is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California San Diego. He is the author of many articles on racial discourse and indigenous culture in Latin America.

Review :
"Kokotovic has provided a comprehensive review of contemporary Peruvian literature - a remarkable analysis and discussion of literary theories in the field of Latin American studies and beyond. The theoretical discussions he pursues will allow his readers a better understanding of how intellectuals and cultural subjects perform within and outside academic institutions." -- Professor Guido Podesta, Dept. of Spanish and Portugueseand Director, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS), University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative strikes me as potentially the most concise and yet also the most clarifying, forthright and plainspoken study of modern Peruvian fiction in English. It enters the tangle of what has now become a very developed but also chaotic-seeming critical literature on Peruvian narrative and indigenism - especially on the central figure throughout, Arguedas - and argues without cavil or poorly-digested 'theoretical' declarations that the concept of 'transculturation', as laid out above all by Angel Rama, simply makes better sense of the field than anything else. Kokotovic has clearly mastered the critical literature he seeks to reform. By valuing coherence over novelty, he has written an intellectually satisfying, useful and informative piece of literary history and criticism." - Neil Larsen, Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Davis. "Kokotovic has provided a comprehensive review of contemporary Peruvian literature -- a remarkable analysis and discussion of literary theories in the field of Latin American studies and beyond. The theoretical discussions he pursues will allow his readers a better understanding of how intellectuals and cultural subjects perform within and outside academic institutions." -- Professor Guido Podesta, Department of Spanish and Portuguese; and Director, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS), University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative strikes me as potentially the most concise and yet also the most clarifying, forthright and plainspoken study of modern Peruvian fiction in English... Kokotovic has clearly mastered the critical literature he seeks to reform. By valuing coherence over novelty, he has written an intellectually satisfying, useful and informative piece of literary history and criticism." -- Neil Larsen, Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Davis.