Martín Oyata
This article posits that Andean culture properly emerged as a literary and intellectual problem in Peru with José María Arguedas, as his work marked a departure from the issues of race and class that had been the focus of classic Indigenism. This turn, realized in his novel Yawar Fiesta (1941), is defined by a poetics of sensibility akin to Romanticism in which culture becomes a space that preserves a group’s identity. In conceiving of sensibility as a collective faculty that creates and maintains a sense of belonging, Arguedas is able to enclose the highland Indians in a hermetic space, thus bringing to the fore the question of the viability of Andean culture that was unknown until then.