Professor Rocío Quispe-Agnoli was one of the invited presenters on the XIII Annual Colloquium for Literature Students at the Federico Villarreal National University (XIII Coloquio Annual de Estudiantes de Literatura, CAELIT), Peru, on December 7th, 2021. In her presentation, titled “Mirage of the Impossible: Speculative Fiction and Genre Bias in Peruvian Literature,” professor Quispe-Agnoli discusses how the literary history of Peru and Latin America have been/are written by patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender (women), race and ethnic origin or the biased expectation that both men and women write within the boundaries of certain textual genres.
Could we assign gender to the writer of a text? In this presentation, Quispe-Agnoli departs from this question to explore speculative fiction (gothic, horror, fantastic, sci-fi) written by Peruvian women writers from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, and their invisibility in both the canon of Peruvian letters and the editorial market.
Additionally, professor Quispe-Agnoli has published an important article on Colonial Latin American Literature as part of the Diccionario de términos críticos y palabras clave en la literatura latinoamericana, coordinated by Beatriz Colombi. This essay-entry reviews and reflects upon the concept “sujeto colonial” as a key concept of Latin American literary and cultural studies. A review of its definitions within the context of Latin American studies of colonialism and coloniality allows one to observe (a) the criticism paradigms within which “sujeto colonial” that have been defined in the last fifty years, alongside interests and expectations of such paradigms; (b) the social and historical changes in each of these critical contexts in which this key notion is defined. This reflection also addresses “sujeto colonial” as a notion that could be used as both an ideological tool of domination and an analytical category of colonial discourse.
