Shining Path’s Literary System: The Barbarians Within Us

Abstract

In the midst of the 1960s alphabet soup of Marxist revolutionaries, an offshoot of Peru’s Communist Party founded Shining Path. The rebel commander, philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, merged the pioneering work of Indo-American socialist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) with dogmatic readings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. On 20–27 March 1980, party leaders read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, a selection of Mao Zedong’s early poetry, the memoirs of Peru’s field marshal Andrés A. Cáceres, Washington Irving’s The Life of Mahomet, Joseph Stalin’s 3 July 1941 radio address, and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. This essay argues these literary readings prepared the party to conduct war by identifying the enemy within, establishing an esprit-de-corps, and enshrining Guzmán as undisputed leader. The timing of the literary sessions coincides with the initiation of a guerrilla war that claimed 69,000 lives and billions of dollars in damage. The principles that nourished Shining Path’s authoritarianism persist today, albeit in mutated form, as political dogmatism emerges to battle reformist policies that deviate from the perceived interests of a radicalized base. The review of Shining Path’s literary system aims to prevent us from unwisely claiming contemporary postcolonial religious, secular or national fundamentalisms within our communities as senseless, savage or irrational anachronisms.

• Aesthetics
• Agamben Giorgio
• Peru
• politics
• postcolonial
• Rancière Jacques
• Shining Path

Notes

1 Mariátegui generally disagreed with Soviet-influenced Latin American communists. Following his death in 1930, new president Eudocio Ravines renamed the party as PCP.

2 Guzmán is hardly the first Marxist to deploy Julius Caesar to instigate political action. Berthold Brecht, for instance, interpolates Mark Antony's forum speech into The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1994). In Latin America, Shakespearean political interpretations have fashioned enduring debates. Inspired by The Tempest, José Enrique Rodó (1967) modelled local postcolonial intellectuals in terms of Prospero, who in a symbolic and material sense colonized a barbarian island. Decades later, Roberto Fernández Retamar (2003) countered with Caliban, Prospero's nemesis and Shakespeare's savage and deformed slave, as the archetype of Latin American identity.

3 Contemporary extremists are similarly portrayed as savages. In Latin America, Dabove examines the fascination that banditry has played in the imagination of regional elites. Bandits become floating signifiers “that are key to an understanding of the diverse regimes of representation that define national identities” (2007, 1). The fears of law-abiding citizens congeal upon the perceived savages that roam the borderlands.

4 In the midst of armed insurrection, Guzmán translated Mao's essay “The Struggle in the Chinkan Mountains” (Guzmán 1983).