Universality and Utopia

Reviews / Votes

In his daring and groundbreaking study, Daniel Sacilotto navigates the political theory of Jose Carlos Mariategui, the poetic vision of Cesar Vallejo, and the narrative anthropology of Jose Maria Arguedas to argue that their seminal engagements with the unemancipated indigenous peoples of the Andes is not a closed chapter for Peruvian history, but a promising corpus to address urgent historical predicaments, and to imagine the possible in our fragmented political present writ large. "Bold, lucid, and convincing, Sacilotto's Universality and Utopia shows how Peruvian indigenismo makes its own the lexicon of Left universalism . A historically grounded argument that can also be translated beyond its local context, Universality and Utopia is not only a major contribution to studies of Latin American literary-political culture, but an important contribution to the philosophy of political internationalism" - Jacques Lezra, Distinguished Professor, University of California-Riverside "Explores imaginaries of emancipation against horizons of Indigenism, international socialism, and national integration in the works of three key twentieth-century Peruvian thinkers: essayist Jose Carlos Mariategui, poet Cesar Vallejo, and novelist Jose Maria Arguedas. Lucidly composed and subtly argued, Universality and Utopia renders the complexity and rigor of Peruvian literary-political imaginings with uncommon clarity and insight" - Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University.