“How do I unplug / this glossary?” asks Peruvian poet and novelist Julia Wong in Vice-royal-ties. By way of a possible answer, poet Victoria Guerrero Peirano writes, “Writing is erased / With one strike / delete.” Or, in Rodrigo Quijano’s terms, we might cast language, instead, in “entire vessels of echoless speech.” Each of these writers speaks to a mutable if ultimately fragile subject, a language unto itself. It is the capacity of writing to dig out, in Quijano’s terms, the “harbinger[s] of something worse /that won’t be quite as easily seen.”
Wong, Quijano, and Guerrero’s work emerged from a changing Peruvian landscape of the 1990s and early 2000s, in the era of the Fujimori dictatorship. In this study session, we will be looking at their work, their shared political and literary concerns, and their differing poetics. We will read selections from recent translations of their writing; discuss their poetics and politics against the backdrop of a broader Peruvian literary scene; and examine their work in relation to life writing, decolonial politics, experiments in subjectivity, and their place vis-à-vis “conversational” poetries.
Born into a tusán (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepén, Peru, Julia Wong Kcomt (1965-2024) was the author of eighteen volumes of poetry, seven books of fiction, and three collections of hybrid prose. In English, her work has been published in The Margins, McSweeney's, Poetry, and other outlets. She lived between Lima and Lisbon.
Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu.