- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Professor in the Humanities
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Art
University of California, Merced
5200 N Lake Road
Merced CA 95343
- Critical Theory, Indigenous Knowledge, Central America, Latin American (And Specifically Central American) Literary and Cultural Studies, Central American Literature, Central America and Mexico, and 11 moreCentral American Studies, Central American History and Culture, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Peoples, Mayan Studies, Contemporary Mayan Literature and Language, Latin American Studies, Latin American literature, Latin American culture, Latin American Cultural Studies, and Latino Studiesedit
- Arturo Arias is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at the University ... moreArturo Arias is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Merced. He has published Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives. Volumes 1 (2017), and 2 (2018). Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960-1990 (1998. 2001-2003 President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Professor Arias co-wrote the film El Norte (1984), and has published seven novels in Spanish, two of which have appeared in English (After the Bombs, 1990, and Rattlesnake, 2003). 2020 Guggenheim Awardee, and 2019 Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, twice winner of the Casa de las Americas Award, and winner of the Ana Seghers Award for Fiction in Germany, he was given the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2008 in his native Guatemala.edit
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... De manera similar, la ?ltima novela de Gioconda Belli, El per gamino de la seducci?n (2005) trata delromance de Juana la Loca con Felipe el Hermoso, desde la ... Como indiqu?en el art?culo del anterior volumen6, al ganar el premio... more
... De manera similar, la ?ltima novela de Gioconda Belli, El per gamino de la seducci?n (2005) trata delromance de Juana la Loca con Felipe el Hermoso, desde la ... Como indiqu?en el art?culo del anterior volumen6, al ganar el premio Alfaguara en 1998 con Margarita, est? ...
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This paper examines the common traits of the "new fiction" being written in Central America since the early 1970s. By examining three novels of Roque Dalton, Sergio Ramirez, and Marcos Carias, respectively, it seeks to explore... more
This paper examines the common traits of the "new fiction" being written in Central America since the early 1970s. By examining three novels of Roque Dalton, Sergio Ramirez, and Marcos Carias, respectively, it seeks to explore how and why this fiction portrays the societies and political crises of the region in a very original way. This phenomenon will be placed in the context of the political role that Central American writers have played in the history of the region.
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Research Interests: Sociology and Indigenous
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Scholarship is most often produced within the frameworks of Eurocentric domination. With few exceptions, this factor often implies a neglect of coloniality in most academic fields. From within a Eurocentric perspective, social purviews... more
Scholarship is most often produced within the frameworks of Eurocentric domination. With few exceptions, this factor often implies a neglect of coloniality in most academic fields. From within a Eurocentric perspective, social purviews tend to centre on positive valorizations of idealized forms of democracy. The latter is most often identified with an open society guaranteeing rule of law, order and pluralism, traits not always seen in existing democratic nation-states, with some exceptions. Indeed, we can claim that even in hegemonic nations, we now witness with greater frequency violent political convulsions tearing apart the social fabric on which democracies are based. At the same time, we should acknowledge that behavioural patterns of dominant Western democracies are to be measured not only for their internal performance, but also for their external involvements elsewhere in the world. In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States, often allied to Britain and other major European powers, claimed to intervene in the affairs of other nations to consolidate democratic aspirations. Yet, with few exceptions, the result is more often that of violent interventions that destroy from within those same nations, and seldom do they succeed in consolidating a democratic model.1 Such interventions are often labelled ‘low-intensity conflicts’, a name invented in the recent past to justify US-led military interventions that devastated the Central American region in the 1980s.
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Maya Time is cyclical. A set number of days must occur before a new cycle can begin. The Maya classical book, the Popol Vuh, which constitutes the heart of the Mesoamerican cultural matrix, still lingers within contemporary Maya identity.... more
Maya Time is cyclical. A set number of days must occur before a new cycle can begin. The Maya classical book, the Popol Vuh, which constitutes the heart of the Mesoamerican cultural matrix, still lingers within contemporary Maya identity. Luis de Lion’s foundational contemporary Maya novel Time Commences in Xibalba (1985) derives its title, its topic, and its symbolism from the Popol Vuh. This essay argues that both works frame a cosmovision whereby humans are understood as subjects conceived within multiple relations with all created elements, the living and dead, and all connected to the cosmos, thus showing that contemporary issues of indigenous cultural production and agency transcend subalternized identities originally associated with specific Latin American nation-states.
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ABSTRACT In “Víctor Montejo and the Maya Perspective: Framing New Kinds of Indigenous Autorepresentations,” Arturo Arias returns to Montejo's Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village (1987) to read the text by the Jakaltek Maya author... more
ABSTRACT In “Víctor Montejo and the Maya Perspective: Framing New Kinds of Indigenous Autorepresentations,” Arturo Arias returns to Montejo's Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village (1987) to read the text by the Jakaltek Maya author and scholar not as a testimonio but rather as an “autorepresentation.” Arias argues that Indigenous autorepresentations differ from autobiographies or Eurocentric autorepresentations of an individual self and analyzes Montejo's Testimony as an emblematic Indigenous autorepresentation—one that represents a subject struggling to gain agency to construct his subjectivity by distancing himself somewhat from his community.
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Los textos aqui presentados son dos fragmentos del libro Ideologia, literatura y sociedad durante la revolucion guatemalteca 1944-54 (Premio de ensayo, Casa de las Americas, 1979). Dicho trabajo lleva, como objetivo el mostrar, a partir... more
Los textos aqui presentados son dos fragmentos del libro Ideologia, literatura y sociedad durante la revolucion guatemalteca 1944-54 (Premio de ensayo, Casa de las Americas, 1979). Dicho trabajo lleva, como objetivo el mostrar, a partir de un analisis concreto (en este caso, la novela Entre la piedra y la cruz del autor guatemalteco Mario Monteforte Toledo, publicada en 1946) que cualquier texto literario se propone la representacion de un fenomeno social cuya vision esta ideologicamente condicionada por su autor; de tal manera, el texto no podria jamas confundirse con el fenomeno historico-social concreto que lo produce.
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... El pro-ceso de ambas es entonces el proceso de romper la dicotomia racio-nalista que obliga al ser a definirse como una cosa u ... La individualizacion surge en el momento en que irrumpe el ero-tismo con la poderosa frase "la... more
... El pro-ceso de ambas es entonces el proceso de romper la dicotomia racio-nalista que obliga al ser a definirse como una cosa u ... La individualizacion surge en el momento en que irrumpe el ero-tismo con la poderosa frase "la virgen de Concepcion era una puta". ...
Research Interests: Art and Literary studies
Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, by V ıctor Montejo, a Jakaltek Maya, inevitably includes written denunciations of what we call human rights violations and inhumane treatment. In theory, these denunciations, as well as the word... more
Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, by V ıctor Montejo, a Jakaltek Maya, inevitably includes written denunciations of what we call human rights violations and inhumane treatment. In theory, these denunciations, as well as the word “testimony” in the book’s title and its emphatic concern not with the self but with a village, should define the text’s genre once and for all. After all, testimonios are crafted like this. However, when we look more closely at Montejo’s text, we find that this work, while indeed bearing witness to an episode in Guatemala’s long civil war (1960–1996), is also autobiographical. It may even be the first one modeling what can become a key epistemological dynamic: Indigenous autobiographies. Considerable progress has been made since the 1980s to address the numerous conceptual failings that have left Indigenous peoples invisible or marginalized in relation to dominant narratives and the available analytical frames in Latin America. To an important degree, Indigenous intellectuals themselves have contested these narratives and frames, highlighting the closely intertwined relationship between scholarly trends and societal politics. Increasing Indigenous creativity is one of the many possible outcomes of our new understanding of coloniality. Domination and racialization are known factors of colonialism as a critical dimension of modernity, a process that has meant Eurocentric perspectives have been overrepresented and Latin American Mestizo subjects have been silenced. Today, as we struggle to tackle all the issues arising from colonialism, we will need to transcend the continuing effect of colonial processes and coloniality. We have first to think of Indigenous peoples as human subjects, then try to find self-representations of Indigenous subjectivities wherever we can find them. To demonstrate how this works, I will use Montejo’s text merely as a short example, reading it not as testimonio but as Indigenous autobiography. I argue that Indigenous autobiographies differ fundamentally from Eurocentric autorepresentations of the individual self. If, as Nadja El Kassar claims, self-representations are “an attitude of the subject,” a form of textual
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In her chapter, Ana Forcinito claims that testimonio is “a narrative that accounts for the construction of collective subjects.” She then adds that “testimonio is generally associated with the term subalternity, and thus, is understood as... more
In her chapter, Ana Forcinito claims that testimonio is “a narrative that accounts for the construction of collective subjects.” She then adds that “testimonio is generally associated with the term subalternity, and thus, is understood as an attempt to undo the erasure, within official narratives, of the existence of a social group and its culture.” Yet, in my understanding, these claims are reductive. I see Forcinito’s position as a US-centric understanding of this critical category, one that evidences more debates that took place in US academia than what testimonio’s emergence and maturation actually looked like in Latin America itself. If, as many US critics claim, the moment of testimonio is over, this is mainly because the politics with which it was invested were conceived in the United States in complete disregard of the real status of testimonial writing in the continent. In the following response to Forcinito I will develop the latter, by first establishing a genealogy from which one can trace an alternative understanding of what was at stake, and then indicate some of the epistemological crossroads that mark the sociohistorical and geocultural specificity of Latin American testimonio, while also trying to recapture the freshness of the articulations between culture and politics, elements that became stale when reread from a US-centered perspective.
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... nationalism, extant among the various Maya ethnic groups vying for indigenous hegemony, and the negative model of the existing "Ladino nation." However, she does speak of being "Guatemalan." The desire for a... more
... nationalism, extant among the various Maya ethnic groups vying for indigenous hegemony, and the negative model of the existing "Ladino nation." However, she does speak of being "Guatemalan." The desire for a collective identity shapes both her narrative and Asturias's with ...
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The presence of coloniality is critical for the explication, and reflection, on racialized and subalternized relations of dominance/subordination. The Spanish invasion in 1492 was the first marker and constitutive element of modernity. In... more
The presence of coloniality is critical for the explication, and reflection, on racialized and subalternized relations of dominance/subordination. The Spanish invasion in 1492 was the first marker and constitutive element of modernity. In 1992 Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano introduced the category of coloniality of power, further developed by Walter Mignolo. This epistemic change not only constituted a pattern of continual production of racialized identities and an unequal hierarchy whereby European identities and knowledge were considered superior to all others in what amounted to a caste system but also generated mechanisms of social domination that preserved this social classification into the present. Coloniality is not limited to the colonial period, which ended for most of Latin America in the first quarter of the 19th century. Despite political independence from Spain or Portugal, the pattern elaborated by Quijano continues to our day, structuring processes of racialization, subalternization, and knowledge production. This is the reason Mignolo labels it a “matrix of power.” Central American–American literature represents the nature of colonialized violence suffered by U.S. Central Americans and constitutes racialized and subalternized migrants as a form of interpellating agency deployed in the name of the excluded subjects. Novelist Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North, Sandra Benítez’s Bitter Grounds, Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and the EpiCentro poets mobilize in different fashions and directions the inner contradictions of identitary and decolonial issues in reaction to colonialized perceptions of textual subjectivities—or their traces—manifested in their respective discursive practices. These phenomena cannot be understood outside of the historical flux generated by the coloniality of power.
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The study of Native American and Indigenous literatures reveals how native knowledges resisted the Westernizing onslaught implemented forcefully since the beginning of the colonial era by colonial authorities, and after the 19th century... more
The study of Native American and Indigenous literatures reveals how native knowledges resisted the Westernizing onslaught implemented forcefully since the beginning of the colonial era by colonial authorities, and after the 19th century by ruling national elites that shared with colonial authorities their belief that local Indigenous cultures needed to be Westernized to be saved. Despite its brutal enforcement, ancestral knowledges managed to resist and survived through the many social crises and transformations that took place from the 16th to the late 20th century. Their lingering effects are visible in this new literary corpus that began to appear in print since the 1960s. In the Latin American case, it is a literary production that is bilingual in nature, as all the authors publish in their own language and in Spanish. The authors in question have rescued their maternal languages in written form and standardized their systems of writing. As Central American-American Indigenous subjects migrate to the United States, they carry with them ancestral knowledges and written literatures as well.
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La presente reflexión tiene por objetivo presentar la complejidad y urgente necesidad de un acercamiento a la ética cósmica y al pensamiento cosmocéntrico, que provoca, desafía y supera los límites de la... more
La presente reflexión tiene por objetivo presentar la complejidad y urgente necesidad de un acercamiento a la ética cósmica y al pensamiento cosmocéntrico, que provoca, desafía y supera los límites de la semántica tradicional eurocéntrica que se basa en la insuficiente dimensión de lo productivo que reduce todos los recursos naturales a bienes de consumo desde una perspectiva materialista y codiciosa, concluyendo que la perspectiva rapiñadora y limitada del materialismo occidental presenta como legado el exterminio, genocidio, robo y permanente amenaza del cosmos y sus seres sintientes, mientras la epistemología relacional establece conexiones con todas las entidades vivientes, integrando, a partir de su significación semiótica lo humano, lo natural (Seres de la Tierra) y lo cósmico, estableciendo entre ellos conexiones de igualdad y reciprocidad, defendiendo el bienestar y la sobrevivencia suya y del otro, la pervivencia y la coexistencia, una ética de vida que rechaza la violenta y perversa condena de la colonialidad genocida y necrofílica.