Antonio Candido's developmentalist theory of "super-regionalism" and the Arguedas case

Abstract

This paper proposes to rethink the literary category of “super-regionalism”, elaborated by Antonio Candido in his essay “Literatura e Subdesenvolvimento” (1970). The paper thus first recalls the text´s argument, according to which the works of Latin American writers of the 1960s - notably Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa and José María Arguedas - represented points of synthesis between regional matter and modernist artistic techniques, constituting universally significant literature. Then, I attempt to demonstrate how this “super-regionalist” literary modernization project was associated, in Candido’s work, with the developmentalist ideology of the 1960s and with certain expectations regarding the direction of the Cuban revolution. Finally, I suggest the concept of “super-regionalism” may be rethought in light of the historical process from the 1970s onwards, characterized, throughout Latin America, by a capitalist development concomitant to the massacre of the left, the increase in social inequality and the extermination of local cultures. To this end, I also consider aspects of the novel Los Ríos Profundos (1958) by Arguedas, which already in the 1950s seems to signal tensions in relation to the reading suggested by “Literatura e subdesenvolvimento”, anticipating problems that would become clearer in the following years.