Narrativas inhumanas: Capitalismo extractivo, delirios animistas y representación textual en José Eustasio Rivera, José María Arguedas y Juan Cárdenas

This dissertation analyzes the literary representation of human and non-human relations in contexts of extractive capitalism in narrative texts by José Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928), José María Arguedas (1911-1969), and Juan Cárdenas (1978-). First, the dissertation explores how Rivera’s Himno a la selva(1924), Arguedas’ Orovilca (1954) and Cárdenas’ Calibán (2017) establish a dialogue between their literary traditions and non-Western animistic epistemologies. This helps in understanding how the authors approach the problem of extractive capitalism in their novels. In La vorágine (1924), Rivera explores how the brutal rationality of rubber extraction in the Amazon region challenges the idea of literature as part of a civilizing project. He also includes in his writing popular animistic ways of reading the territory. In The Fox of Above and the Fox of Below (1969-1970), Arguedas incorporates aspects of Andean animistic shamanic rituals into his work to understand a social catastrophe in a small city in Peru during the late 1960s (when it became the epicenter of an industrial fishing economic boom). This allows the characters and narrators to understand the chaos and degradation originated by the fishing industry from a non-human point of view. In El diablo de las provincias (2016), Cárdenas portrays a confrontation between a scientific-aesthetic holistic model of nature, a magical-popular knowledge based on analogical reasoning, and the instrumental rationality of extractive mono-crops (which seek to transform nature and society in a simplified, symmetric, productive system). In the novel, the mono-crop appears as all-powerful being that turns humans and non-humans into entities servicing the never-ending expansion of extractive agriculture. Therefore, these three authors question the divide between nature and culture and explore the limits of non anthropocentric writings to challenge the underlying rationality of extractive capitalism and to effectively fight against it My dissertation establishes theoretical a dialogue between Latin American intellectual traditions and contemporary cultural and social theories. Mainly, the analysis of the nature/culture divide is approached in relation to anthropologists’ Phillipe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro theories on non-anthropocentric ontologies. The dissertation also examines the links between geography, cultural and economic conflicts, and knowledge as conceptualized by literary critics Ángel Rama, Antionio Cornejo Polar and Mary Louise Pratt, political scientist James Scott, and anthropologist Margarita Serje.