History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography

Abstract

History’s Peru is not an intellectual history of the idea of Peru but rather a series of critical essays on important works and debates in Peruvian history writing from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to Jorge Basadre. These are organized chronologically in an arc that reproduces the canonical understanding of Peruvian historiography in which Inca Garcilaso creates a philosophical-historical “Peru” that is later reconceptualized by modern republicans. Attentive to intertextuality among the works he studies, Thurner does not examine causal relations so much as offer a series of readings, inspired by the strategies and debates prevalent in European historiography at the time of the works’ creation. The principal thematic link is a strong emphasis on how Peruvian historians negotiated, challenged, and disrupted the conceptual position allocated to Peru in European (and North American) historiography and historical philosophy. Beyond the work’s intervention in Peruvian historiography, the author actively engages postcolonial studies and critical historiography generally.The first three chapters focus on Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s and Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo’s works. To the strong literature on the former, this book contributes provocative readings of the well-known chapters on the naming of Peru and the double beginnings of the work, through the critical lens of Alain Badiou. As to Peralta, Thurner is to be lauded for turning attention to this neglected, but fascinating and highly influential eighteenth-century limeño. The subject position of the creole intellectual is well elaborated and related to Peralta’s efforts simultaneously to defend the Spanish Empire (against European intellectual critiques) and to criticize it (as a marginalized colonial noble). Unfortunately, the discussion of Peralta’s oeuvre suffers seriously (and inexplicably, in a book on poetics) from the failure to examine the political and intellectual significance of genre. That Peralta’s defense of Spain is a generic prose history and his historical account of Peru is the verse epic, Lima fundada, is clearly important to Peralta’s attempts to locate Peru temporally, geographically, and ontologically. More generally, in the discussion of Peralta and throughout the work, Thurner’s analysis reproduces a pronounced Lima-centrism. The decision to focus only on printed texts necessarily excludes other historiographical traditions practiced by indigenous authors, churchmen, and creole vecinos of the viceroyalty’s highland cities.The second half of the book locates the works of important postcolonial Peruvian historians in both Peruvian politics and European intellectual debates with universalizing aspirations. As Thurner argues, formulating a republican identity in Peru engaged the question of location from not only a national but also a postcolonial vantage point, thereby challenging European hierarchies of time, place, and social evolution. This produced, among others, the widely read nineteenth-century history texts of Sebastián Lorente, suggesting that Peru in its history bridged the Oriental/Occidental chasm on which European superiority rested. Finally Thurner turns to two giants of twentieth-century Peruvian letters, Jorge Basadre and José Carlos Mariátegui. It is Basadre, rather than the more doctrinaire Marxist Mariátegui, whom Thurner celebrates. Basadre’s injunction “to write a Peruvian history of Peru” neatly captures the impossible task confronting the colonial and postcolonial scholar: to articulate a Peruvian history in a genre that denies the possibility of such a history. Thurner thus celebrates those historians who have simultaneously imitated and undermined European genres, categories, and narratives in order to valorize an otherwise marginalized Peru. It is a provocative reading of Peruvian historiography, but it is executed through an idiosyncratic and selective reading of Peru’s rich historiographical tradition.One real weakness of this work is a failure to engage with Peruvian historiography after Basadre. The sizable Peruvian literature on Basadre himself is relegated to one listlike footnote. Those hoping for a discussion of the politics and poetics of historiography in Peru during the past half-century, with the explosion of academic history, will be disappointed. This work is instead written into larger postcolonial discussions and critiques of metahistorical narrative and ontology; it consciously offers itself as part of the intellectual effort to de center Europe. The result is a deeply original exploration of how Peruvians have challenged spatial, historical, and ontological categories fashioned in Europe over three centuries. Nonetheless, greater attention to how current Peruvian historians (above all Manuel Burga) have addressed the meaning and goal of writing history in Peru and to synthetic national histories by more recent Peruvian historians (e.g., Franklin Pease) would have helped to locate the book’s project in contemporary Peruvian intellectual life, as well as in North American academe.