CONTEMPORARY QUECHUA POETRY

RUPTURES AND PERSISTENCE OF VICEREGAL HETEROGENEITY

Abstract

The present article aims to give an account of the continuities of the Andean literary project, which emerged in the midst of the violence of the viceroyalty, and which are manifested in contemporary Quechua poetry. Starting from the delimitation of two fundamental moments in twentieth-century Quechua poetry (the manorial-indigenist and the migrant poetics), an attempt will be made to trace the differences and continuities of the heterogeneity that is the foundation of Andean literatures. In general, it is argued that the heterogeneous literatures of the Andean areas have served (and continue to serve) writers (indigenous and mestizo) to account for their processes of identity negotiation and the multiple cultural heritages that shape them. Although it is acknowledged that in the Andean area there is a conflict (at times irresolvable) between writing and orality, at the same time it is noted that these poetics seem to be guided by the hope of achieving a complementary relationship between Western techniques and Amerindian ancestral knowledge.