Mark Thurner

From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru

From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru’s troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner’s reading of the Andean peasantry’s engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism. Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.

After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas

Insisting on the critical value of Latin American histories for recasting theories of postcolonialism, After Spanish Rule is the first collection of essays by Latin Americanist historians and anthropologists to engage postcolonial debates from the perspective of the Americas. These essays extend and revise the insights of postcolonial studies in diverse Latin American contexts, ranging from the narratives of eighteenth-century travelers and clerics in the region to the status of indigenous intellectuals in present-day Colombia. The editors argue that the construction of an array of singular histories at the intersection of particular colonialisms and nationalisms must become the critical project of postcolonial history-writing. Challenging the universalizing tendencies of postcolonial theory as it has developed in the Anglophone academy, the contributors are attentive to the crucial ways in which the histories of Latin American countries—with their creole elites, hybrid middle classes, subordinated ethnic groups, and complicated historical relationships with Spain and the United States—differ from those of other former colonies in the southern hemisphere. Yet, while acknowledging such differences, the volume suggests a host of provocative, critical connections to colonial and postcolonial histories around the world. Contributors Thomas Abercrombie Shahid Amin Jorge Canizares-Esguerra Peter Guardino Andres Guerrero Marixa Lasso Javier Morillo-Alicea Joanne Rappaport Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo Mark Thurner

Jorge Basadre's “Peruvian History of Peru,” or the Poetic Aporia of Historicism

thanks. Support from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the University of Florida is gratefully acknowledged. All translations are mine. 1. There is no systematic work on Basadre, but several Peruvian scholars have reflected upon aspects of his work, and the centennial celebration has prompted the publication of conference proceedings. See Pablo Macera, Conversaciones con Basadre (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1979); Alberto Flores Galindo, “Jorge Basadre o la voluntad de persistir,” Allpanchis 14, no. 16 (1980): 3 – 8; Magdalena Chocano, “Ucronía y frustración en la conciencia histórica peruana,” Márgenes 1, no. 2 (1987): 43 – 60; Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, Nación peruana: Entelequia o utopía: Trayectoria de una falacia (Lima: Centro Regional de Estudios Socio Económicos, 1988); Miguel Maticorena Estrada, Nación e Historicismo de Jorge Basadre (Lima: Asociación de Docentes Pensionistas de la UNMSM, 2003); Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy and Mónica Ricketts, eds., Homenaje a Jorge Basadre: El hombre, su obra y su tiempo (Lima: Instituto Riva-Agüero, 2004); and Manuel Pantigoso, ed., Cátedra Basadre (Lima: Editorial Hozlo, 2004).

The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (review)

it is that (except for the chapter explicitly addressing the Spanish concept of sin), he begins each thematically organized unit with a look at pre-conquest sources, or at least the very earliest possible post-conquest images or descriptions of ceremonies. Only then does he move on to colonial-era sources, largely produced under Spanish supervision of some stripe, reading them with an ability to hear echoes of and responses to an earlier time.

The As-If of the Book of Kings: Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's Colonial Poetics of History

Prior to the nineteenth century, the book of kings, or dynastic history, was the dominant mode of historiography in Europe and the Americas. This article explores the as-if or in-theory dimension of colonial dynastic history by way of a reading of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevos early-eighteenth-century histories of Spain and Peru. Peraltas histories have been read as sycophantic, premodern texts that not only do not live up to the modern standards of historiography but moreover are in bad taste, that is, rhetorically prone to the excesses of Limas colonial court culture. In contrast, I argue that Peraltas poetics of history reveal the subtle and ingenious rhetorical means by which history came to occupy, via imitating the figure of the prince, a sovereign and prognostic position of critique as the princes simulacrum, that is, as a copy that has no original other than itself. In the case of Peraltas histories, this position of critique was colonial and postcolonial.