Originally published in 1994, Writing in the Air is one of the most significant books of modern Latin American literary and cultural criticism. In this seminal work, the influential Latin American literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar offers the most extended articulation of his efforts to displace notions of hybridity or "mestizaje" dominant in Latin American cultural studies with the concept of heterogeneity: the persistent interaction of cultural difference that cannot be resolved in synthesis. He reexamines encounters between Spanish and indigenous Andean cultural systems in the New World from the Conquest into the 1980s. Through innovative readings of narratives of conquest and liberation, homogenizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses, and contemporary Andean literature, he rejects the dominance of the written word over oral literature. Cornejo Polar decenters literature as the primary marker of Latin American cultural identity, emphasizing instead the interlacing of multiple narratives that generates the heterogeneity of contemporary Latin American culture.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword by Jean Franco
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Voice and the Written Word in the Cajamarca “Dialogue”
- The Cajamarca Chronicle
- Rituals of Other Memories
- A Perhaps Impossible Reading
- Identity, Alterity, History
- Chapter 2: The Sutures of Homogeneity: Discourses of Impossible Harmony
- Garcilaso: Harmony Rent Asunder
- Social Depictions of the Inca
- From Garcilaso to Palma: One Language for All?
- Concerning Patriotic Speeches and Proclamations
- In Fiction: Three Novels
- Cumandá
- Torn from the Nest
- Juan de la Rosa
- Celebrations
- Chapter 3: Stone of Boiling Blood: The Challenges of Modernization
- The Ambiguities of a New Language
- The Emergence of Dualisms
- An Andean Modernity
- A Hobbled History: The Indigenist Novel
- The Subject Explodes
- Underground Voices
- Overture
- Notes
- Index
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