Events at Reed

Through interdisciplinary research and recent fieldwork, this talk, sponsored by the Reed Spanish department, will present an ongoing project that documents an endangered community: the Iskonawa of the Peruvian central Amazon forest. The Iskonawa oral tradition is full of knowledge about nature and survival strategies that speak volumes about the environment and the possibility of coexistence among humans and between humans and nature. However, like all indigenous societies in Latin America, the Isknonawa are threatened by deforestation, contamination, crime and drug trafficking. This case study also sheds light on canonic texts of the indigenista literary tradition and challenges some premises of postcolonial and decolonial theory.

José Antonio Mazzotti, professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University, is also president of the International Association of Peruvianists and director of the Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana. Selected scholarly publications by Professor Mazzotti include Argos Arequipensis (2014), Crítica de la razón heterogénea. Antonio Cornejo Polar: textos esenciales (2013), Renacimiento mestizo: los 400 años de los Comentarios reales (2010), Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (with Ralph Bauer, 2009), Incan Insights: El Inca Garcilaso’s Hints to Andean Readers (2008), Poéticas del flujo: migración y violencia verbales en el Perú de los 80 (2002), Edición e interpretación de textos andinos (with Ignacio Arellano, 2000), Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: resonancias andinas (1996), and Asedios a la heterogeneidad cultural (with Juan Zevallos Aguilar, 1996).  His poetry books include Poemas no recogidos en libro (1981), Fierro curvo (órbita poética) (1985), Castillo de popa (1988 and 1991), El libro de las auroras boreales (1995), Señora de la Noche (1998), El zorro y la luna, antología poética 1981-1999 (1999), Sakra boccata (2006, 2007 and 2013) and Las flores del Mall (2009).