Transiciones capitalistas: Todas las sangres (1964) de José María Arguedas y el "desborde" de la forma realista

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that José María Arguedas's Todas las sangres (1964) accounts for the turbulent context of the 1960s—marked by numerous attempts to promote agrarian reforms—through the realist form to depict the socio-economic and cultural transformations occurring in the Peruvian highlands. Although this literary form was relegated to oblivion in comparison to Latin American Boom novels, I eschew a dichotomous view between "outdated" and "modern" or more experimental poetics in order to highlight the adaptation and mutation of the realist form—what the Warwick Research Collective has termed "peripheral realisms"—as an effective resource for Arguedas to disclose a historical transition in Peru. Building on a revalorization of the literary form, I assert that Arguedas's novel addresses peasant movements centered on land struggles alongside the conflict between an emerging bourgeois class (aiming for national industrialization), imperialist capitalism, and popular sectors (represented by peasants, Indigenous peoples, and the working class). As a result, the realist elements in Todas las sangres engage in a dialectic of emergence and cancellation of a peripheral national bourgeoisie. Finally, I claim that the realist apparatus reveals an apparent rupture ("overflow") toward the end of the novel, symbolized by the mythical figure of yawar mayu .