Blogs

Hello everyone – at the risk of sounding too much like an English student, I have decided to return way back to our days with The Lima Reader. The reason I risk sounding too much like an English student is that I wish to do this to draw on Herman Melville’s words about Lima. I […] read full post >>

Wait. Is this fucking play about my family? read full post >>

This week, we have been tasked with choosing a single line from any of our readings so far and writing a blog about it. I have chosen the line, “The world had never been sadder—completely burnt out, without hope, sunken into my entrails like an icy sorrow.” This line comes from the chapter “The Insurrection” […] read full post >>

These past two days have been gruelling for many of us who caught what we believe to be a virus, so I will try to muster up a semi-decent blog post. For the second part of the week, we are discussing Modern Inquisitions by Irene Silverblatt. One quote that struck me was from the prologue on page 19: “ read full post >>

Back in Cusco we talked about indigeniety and how it is intertwined with colonialism because without colonialism you don’t have indigeniety. With this in mind while I was reading I thought that Silverblatt put it very well when she said that the Spanish “tried to make Indians out of Andeans” and that “Andean Indianness was […] read full post >>

Reading Blog 6 read full post >>

week4—against abstraction; a challenge of concrete action and wasted breath— reading blog #6 – on Mariategui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. I think this was one of the most interesting readings we’ve had thus far. Coming from a Canadian and North American context, thinking about Indigeneity and the ‘Indian Problem’ as an economic one, […] read full post >>

While reading Mariátegui’s “The Problem of the Indian: A New Approach”, I couldn’t help but make connections to Frantz Fanon. Though to be fair I think about Frantz Fanon a lot. While they were writing in quite different contexts, they are both fundamentally concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples and the dismantling systems of exploitation while also confronting the underlying socio-economic and psychological forces that sustain oppression. For Mariátegui, the root cause of Indigenous oppression lies firmly in the inequitable distribution of land and the entrenched power of the...read more read full post >>

To be honest, economics is neither my area of expertise or area of interest. That being said, Mariategui does a good job of laying out the economic structurings of Peru in a readable and straightforward way. In relation to indigeneity, his main point in Essays on Peruvian Reality is that “the problem of the Indian” […] read full post >>

This week, we examined the chapter “Becoming Indian” from Modern Inquisitions, where Irene Silverblatt explores the complex process of identity formation imposed upon indigenous populations by Spanish colonial authorities. The chapter delves into how the Spanish sought to reshape and control Indigenous identities through religious conversion, legal manipulations, and cultural domination. Additionally, we read José […] read full post >>