Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 07:31:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: Radhika Gajjala <rxgst6+-AT-pitt.edu>
Subject: this time it's really part 4 - nts will follow - eventually


      I can illustrate more concretely what is at stake here by
turning to the three texts associated with the Tupac Amaru
rebellion I mentioned at the start.  These are the Genealogia,
written in Spanish by the leader of the rebellion, Jose Gabriel
Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, which is the text of a legal
petition defending his claim to be descended from the last Inca
he presented to the Real Audiencia de Lima in 1777, three
years before the rebellion; the Memorias (also known as
Cuarenta anos de cuativerio or El cautiverio dilatado) of his
brother, Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, which appeared in
Buenos Aires in 1825, also in Spanish; and the play Ollantay,
written and performed in Quechua before indigenous
audiences--one was said to have included Jose Gabriel himself--
around 1780, but based entirely on the conventions of the
Spanish Golden Age drama, including the three act form of the
comedia and the figure of the gracioso.
      The Genealogia is a text immersed in the form and
baroque rhetoric of colonial legalism. It was inspired to a
certain extent, although with a more immediately utilitarian
purpose, by the sort of geneology that Garcilaso constructed a
century and a half earlier in the Comentarios reales to justify
the right of the Inca aristocracy to share in the administration
of the viceroyalty with the representatives of the Spanish
crown.  In the light of Jose Gabriel's subsequent role in the
rebellion of 1780, one can see latent in his intention of securing
his claim to be the direct descendant of the last Inca the aim of
eventually defeating the colonial regime and occupying himself
the position of Inca in a restoration of the Inca state itself.
Though, like Sor Juana's Respuesta a Sor Filotea, the 
Genealogia has elements of autobiography and family history,
it is more like an expanded version of a prueba de limpieza de
sangre than an autobiography as such.  The rhetorical
elaboration of the document, which seems excessive for what is
after all a formal legal petition, is intended to establish Jose
Gabriel's mastery of the aristocratizing codes of the viceregal
ciudad letrada.  It defines a parity between himself and his
Spanish and creole interlocutors. By contrast, his brother's
Memorias, which appear some fifty years later, is an
autobiography in the modern sense and reveals an entirely new
rhetoric and persona.  The Memorias posits Juan Bautista's
experience in Spanish prisons after the defeat of the rebellion
as a metonomny of the degradation to which Spanish colonial
rule has subjected America.  If the Genealogia anticipates the
rebellion of 1780 by establishing the legitimacy of Jose
Gabriel's claim to be the descendant of Tupac Amaru I, the
Memorias articulates a sense of the continuity between that
rebellion and the liberal revolutions of the creoles nearly half
a century  later.  It is the sort of text that Bolivar or San
Martin would have read with pleasure10.
      If, however, we try to study these texts as examples of
the appropriation of European literary models by
representatives of an Indian rebellion against colonial
authority--that is, under the aegis of the transculturation
model--we will rapidly encounter an impasse.  Neither the
Genealogia nor the Memorias figure in the canon of Latin
American or, for that matter, Peruvian literature, but it is not
simply a question of including these texts and others like them
in the canon (although it goes without saying that they should
be included in the canon).  Rather, the impasse is produced as
a rsult of a problem Paul de Man identified in a text that bears
a family resemblance to the Memorias in particular, Rousseau's
Confessions.  Although in their construction of an allegory of
the subject the Genealogia and the Memorias evidently
"generate history" (the phrase is De Man's11)--in the language
of speech act theory, they are performative, they are part of the
ideological mise en scene of the rebellion or of its aftermath--
they do not represent history (in the double sense Spivak's
article articulates: that is, either politically or mimetically). 
The autobiographical subjects they configure are simply
incommensurate with the actual character of the rebellion,
which involves the collective action of large and heterogeneous
sectors of both indigenous and creole populations.  The
metonymic chain that we have learned to identify in a
testimonio like I, Rigoberta Menchu, which connects the textual
representation of an individual life experience of the narrator
to the collective destiny of the class or social group, cannot be
completed here. 
      There is a related problem that the historian Leon
Campbell has noted.  Campbell agrees with scholars of Andean
literature like Martin Lienhardt or Rolena Adorno that there
existed since the Conquest a written Andean Quechua-Spanish
"resistance literature," based on adaptations of European
models, which nourished the world-view of the leaders of the
indigenous communities like the Tupac Amaru family (we
know, for example,  that Tupac Amaru himself carried on his
person an edition of the Comentarios reales of Garcislaso).  But
the documentary evidence that has been amassed around the
rebellion also reveals the existence of a radically different
culture of rebellion, a predominantly Andean-based and oral
(or, more accurately, despite the apparent anachronism, audio-
visual) culture, developed for and by the rebels--mainly
peasants and artisans and members of their families--who made
up the great tupamarista and katarista armies, and who (on the
whole) neither read nor spoke Spanish, nor were particularly
concerned to learn how to.  Campbell concludes that there
existed what he calls a "dual idiom" of the rebellion: on the
one hand, texts written in Spanish like the Genealogia or the
proclamations and letters issued by the rebel leadership to the
creoles or colonial authorities; on the other, the non-, or even
anti- literary cultural practices deployed by the rebels
themselves.12  For the leaders of the rebellion, like the Tupac
Amaru family itself, such an ambivalence responded to
contradictions in their own ideological formation and position
within the colonial system and in their efforts to semiotize
themselves as leaders (Tupac Amaru sometimes wore Inca
clothing, other times European-style military uniforms, for
example).  
      But Campbell's idea of a dual idiom is not merely
conjunctural or tactical, nor does it only refer to divisions in
the practices of the leadership.  It also coincides with the terms
of a well-known historical debate about the nature--reformist
or revolutionary?--of the uprising itself.  As Campbell puts it, 

      When one takes only the Spanish-language
      literary record into account, the focus of the
      rebellion appears to be directed exclusively
      towards the cities and their creole inhabitants
      and the rebel program focused on material
      issues, concerned primarily with dismantling the
      harsh economic reforms of the Bourbons, which
      impoverished many Peruvians through increased
      taxes and commercial restrictions.
If, on the other hand, the roles of myth, symbolism and
ceremony, of ritual and response, are also examined and 
      their interior meanings better defined, it is clear that not
      only did these comprise an important part of the
      literature of the rebellion but that these ideas were often
      at variance with what the rebels seemed to be asking for
      in the written proposals.  Because the rebel's Spanish
      language directives were focused on the major
      commercial centers which had remained loyal to the
      Crown or creole areas under rebel control... they give
      the rebellion a 'tactical rationalism' very characteristic
      of the times....  They also fit nicely with Western
      definitions of eighteenth-century rebellion as it
      developed in Europe and America  (Campbell 1987).

In other words, the historian who choses literary texts like the
Genealogia or the Memorias as representative of the culture
and goals of the rebellion will see an essentially reformist
movement, conceived within the language and the legal and
cultural codes imposed by the process of European colonization
of the Andes, now creolized or (to use the postmodernist term)
"refunctioned," while the historian who looks beyond these
texts to other cultural practices will see something that looks
more like a revolution from below of the poorest and most
exploited sectors of the indigenous population, with
conjunctural allies among the creoles and the caciques, aimed
at restoring the Inca state.