Vallejo, Semicolonialism, and Poetemporality

Abstract

How meaningful is it to think of César Vallejo as a representative of a non-Western tradition, a tradition opposed to the Western tradition and certainly to Western modernity? Two subsidiary questions immediately arise: what do we understand by the phrase non-Western and what would it mean here to be a “representative”? I shall approach these questions by drawing in turn on two traditions of criticism that have acquired prominence in the Western academy in recent decades and at the heart of which lies an overt political concern to redress the intellectual as much as political misrepresentation of those areas of the globe that fall outside the main Western powerbloc. The respective traditions are those of postcolonial theory and Latin American cultural studies.