Resumen de Los límites de la ciudad letrada: subalternidad, literatura y transculturación
Taking into account the phenomenon of massive migration and the development of the mass media that occurred in this century, the author discusses and problematizes the notion of 'transculturation' that Fernando Ortiz introduced and Angel Rama adapted to the field of social culture and literature in order to explain the way the modern state in Latin America was culturally constructed and the function that intellectuals assumed as interpreters of this process. Anchored to the viewpoint held by Subaltern Studies (i.e., an assessment in which the role of subaltern colectivities in the construction of national identity is given primacy), the essay is meant to demonstrate that whereas the cultural-political project based on the idea of transculturation connotes the synthesis or fusion of opposites - city-country, Creole-Indian, dominant-subaltern - the presence of subalternity in the building-up of a nation rather points to their limits. The limits can become visible once that the confrontation between a pre-literary or oral culture and a literary or written one is examined. By analyzing four texts representative of the cultural dynamics prevalent in the Andean region during the colonial period, the author seeks to rehistoricize (to de-essentialize) the Andean basis of the nationalistic and the Indian movements in Peru. Recovering subalternity for history does not mean to renounce the national element. It only implies that this new allegory of the national-subaltern domain would not constitute anymore a discourse on how the many become one, but a discourse on how a single entity is fragmented into its many components; in other words, how the one is open to linguistic and cultural heterogeneity.
