Umbrales del hedor: diálogos geoculturales entre la poesía de Teresa Orbegoso y la filosofía americanista de Rodolfo Kusch

Abstract

The poetry of Peruvian writer Teresa Orbegoso interweaves Andean epistemologies and precarious materials in a land writing that is both geographical and cultural, and which is inspired in Rodolfo Kusch’ Americanist philosophy. Although the Kuschean philosophy, collected in his Obras completas, has received scarce attention within the field of ecocriticism, it has been described by Eduardo Gudynas (2010) as the precursor of ecophilosophical thought in Latin America. With a focus on Orbegoso's poetic approach, in this essay I intend to discuss how this contemporary poetry activates the Kuschean notion of "stench of the soil" inspired by the ancestral Aymara and Quechua knowledge of northern Argentina, southern Bolivia and the peoples of Peru with the objective to highlight a poetic-philosophical approach to the soil. In addition, I place Kusch’s Americanist philosophy within the frame of contemporary ecocritical discussions that update ancestral epistemologies as a source of knowledge for the present and the future. I also propose to recover a critical vocabulary from Rodolfo Kusch's philosophy in order to understand the elaborations of this contemporary poetry that approaches notions of the ground and the soil from the ancestral, the corporeal and the precarious through making use of a Latin American philosophical episteme.