Placing Place: Speech in José María Arguedas’ The Foxes

Lucas Izquierdo

Latin American & Iberian Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/als.2013.14011                

Abstract

Critical approximations carried out from the global south entail spatial and epistemological challenges to the hegemony of western modernity. This article argues that José María Arguedas’ The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below(1971) produces a language that embodies and transforms an Aris-totelian conception of speech. Written in an avant-garde vernacular, the novelcongeals a multiplicity of worldviews, utopias, and mercantile discourses that converge in Chimbote-Peru. Guided by Jacques Ran-ciere’s Disagreement(1998) and Dissensus(2010), the analysis is divided in two stages. The first stage examines the notion of speech and a constitutive wrong that establishes a community. The second stage addresses the symbiotic relationship of speech, its place of enunciation, and the conception of an alternate social order. The analysis places Arguedas incritical dialogue with Aristotelian speech, Ranciere’s notion of wrong, and the emergence or failure of claiming speech in canonical history.

Keywords

Arguedas; Speech; Ranciere; Aristotle; Castro-Klaren; Mignolo

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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