Imagining Modernity in the Andes deals with the intersection of projects of modernity and cultural representation in the Andes. The Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas occupies a privileged place in a study that charts the social, cultural, and intellectual transformations that took place in the Andes throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In its examination of political and literary indigenistas of the 1920s, applied anthropology in the 1950s, the novelistic response to emigration and urbanization, the theory of transculturation in the era of transnationalism, and the appearance of new visual technologies in a cultural context long defined by the oral-textual divide, Imagining Modernity in the Andes conducts the type of interdisciplinary approach which a full appreciation for the heterodoxies of Andean cultural production makes indispensable.
