“…Pero las hornacinas estaban desiertas”: tramado trágico y modernidad indígena en Yanakuna de Jesús Lara

Abstract

2022 marked the 70th anniversary of the publication of Luis Lara's Yanakuna, one of the seminal books of Andean literary indigenism. The novel has a rebellious and disruptive quality, not only because the protagonist is the most endearing female indigenous rebel in Bolivian literature, but also because it takes distance from traditional literary indigenism in how discusses the historical relationship between indigenous and national modernity. Following Hayden White's analysis of “explanation by emplotment,” this article analyzes the tensions generated by the tragic mode of emplotment in the novel as a strategy to displace the vindictive romance of traditional indigenist narratives, and to construct the image of the indigenous as a modern identity in tension with the affirmation of national modernity.