When Was Peru Modern? On Declarations of Modernity in Peru

Abstract

In this essay I have made a number of “cuts” in the temporal continuum of what is thought of as the modern period in Peru, and in the ordering and presentation of materials I have sought to embody the nonlinearity that my argument proposes as necessary for understanding what is problematic about the idea of modernity in Peru. To think of them as cuts in the continuum of history is misleading, since this would simply be the continuum that history is imagined to consist of. In fact they are not cuts in a preexisting continuum, given that each one constitutes of itself a particular temporality: that is, each one displays the work of constituting a temporality. The type of effect they produce can be summed up in the proposition that there is no such thing as a single temporal continuity, not even a single continuity with several strands, but rather, various cuts or moments in which the time of the modern is constituted in Peru. By constituted I mean that its components and the relationships between them become recognizable or readable. That several such moments can be identified—and my series could no doubt be added to—points up the partial and contested nature of the modern in Peru.

Para abrir por fin rendijasen la pared del tiempo.

E. A. Westphalen

Knowledge, like history, is incomplete.

Georges Bataille