José Carlos Mariátegui's Unfinished Revolution : Politics, Poetics, and Change in 1920s Peru

The years 1909-1930, the eleven-year presidency of the businessman-turned-politician Augusto B. Leguía, mark a formative period of Peruvian modernity, witnessing the continuity of a process of reconstruction and the development of an intellectual and cultural tradition after a humbling defeat during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). But these years were also fraught with conflict generated by long-standing divisions and new rivalries. A postwar generation of intellectuals and artists, led by José Carlos Mariátegui and galvanized by left-wing thinking and an avant-garde aesthetic, sought representation in the fields of politics and the arts to realize the modernizing potentialities opened up by a Positivist oligarchy. New political and artistic conceptions raised their awareness of the fractured sense of nationhood in Peru and the need for a new project of nation-formation based on a common political and cultural consciousness. Crucially, this gave rise to divergent political and artistic positions and

Portal, Ángela Ramos, and Julia Codesido whose work he championed. These readings are fully contextualized in terms of detailed critical study of complex sociopolitical conditions and positions, and biographical, intellectual backgrounds of Mariátegui and his contemporaries. This monograph underscores the fundamental importance of Mariátegui in the development of political and artistic practices and projects that shaped a national, shared, yet also heterogeneous, political culture and cultural tradition in Peru during and after his lifetime. [Publisher's text]

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