The Andean Gothic as Local form and Global Story: How Contemporary Latin American Women Writers are (Re)writing Indigeneity

Abstract

This paper examines narratives by Mónica Ojeda and Liliana Colanzi, two diasporic Latin American contemporary women writers who are often identified as exponents of the ‘Andean Gothic’. Indigenous myths and languages, interwoven into their narratives, paint a disturbing canvas of incest, gendered violence, political turmoil, and the blurred line between human and animal. Drawing on the work of scholars of indigenismo and reading those alongside Latina/o and Critical Indigeneity studies, the paper decentres the analytical frameworks concerned with the Global Gothic that usually engage these authors. It argues that this alternative framing can shed new light on the ways in which the Andean Gothic attempts to enact decolonial imaginaries.