The Last Inca: Hegemony and Abjection in an Andean Poetics of Discrimination

Popular dramatizations of the Incas’ defeat by the Spaniards remain widespread across the central Andes. Most studies assume such dramatizations to be a form of resisting hegemony from “dominant” sectors of Peruvian society. This article proposes an alternative interpretation: Andean poetic “resistance” actually perpetuates the hegemonic discourse it attempts to resist. In order to prove this point, I advance one theoretical and one methodological innovation. The first innovation is to integrate Laclau & Mouffe’s political theory of hegemony with Kristeva’s psychological theory of abjection. The resulting framework is a powerful tool for exploring how hegemonic articulations acquire deep emotional and cognitive resonance at the psychological level. The second innovation is to apply this framework to the case of folk literature. Given its often ritualistic context, with the heightened emotional and aesthetic dimensions that this entails, folk literature is ideally placed to reveal underlying worldviews that inform social attitudes. Taking one Quechua epic as a case study, I trace the intellectual lineage of the genre to two main philosophical traditions: Augustinian and pre-Hispanic. By exploring how the Andean poetics of resistance combines and reshapes philosophical concepts from both traditions, I illustrate how cultural syncretism is not random but instead a highly specific, ideologized, process.