Shining Path’S Literary System: The Barbarians Within Us

Keywords

Aesthetics; Agamben Giorgio; Peru; politics; postcolonial; Rancière Jacques; Shining Path

Abstract

In the midst of the 1960s alphabet soup of Marxist revolutionaries, an offshoot of Peru’s Communist Party founded Shining Path. The rebel commander, philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, merged the pioneering work of Indo-American socialist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) with dogmatic readings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. On 20–27 March 1980, party leaders read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, a selection of Mao Zedong’s early poetry, the memoirs of Peru’s field marshal Andrés A. Cáceres, Washington Irving’s The Life of Mahomet, Joseph Stalin’s 3 July 1941 radio address, and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. This essay argues these literary readings prepared the party to conduct war by identifying the enemy within, establishing an esprit-de-corps, and enshrining Guzmán as undisputed leader. The timing of the literary sessions coincides with the initiation of a guerrilla war that claimed 69,000 lives and billions of dollars in damage. The principles that nourished Shining Path’s authoritarianism persist today, albeit in mutated form, as political dogmatism emerges to battle reformist policies that deviate from the perceived interests of a radicalized base. The review of Shining Path’s literary system aims to prevent us from unwisely claiming contemporary postcolonial religious, secular or national fundamentalisms within our communities as senseless, savage or irrational anachronisms.

Publication Date

11-17-2017

Publication Title

Interventions

Volume

19

Issue

8

Number of Pages

1069-1087

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1348246

Socpus ID

85023201318 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85023201318

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