César Calvo or the other halves of Peru

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía in order to rethink how the Amazonian universe (with its beliefs, myths, and knowledge) participates in the construction of Peruvian identity, assuming a notion of identity that is defined by heterogeneity. We propose a reading of Calvo’s novel in the frame of Amazonian indigenism, which creates tensions with other literary formulations of the Andean utopia. The paper also looks into how the invention of an ethnographic narrator allows the intersection of diverse sociocultural universes in the novel.