Inkakuna en París: el liberalismo modernista en "El oro del Perú" de Aurora Cáceres

Abstract

Aurora Cáceres is a Peruvian novelist, essayist and art critic known initially for her relationship with the modernista literary movement, a hemispheric trend concerned with Latin American modernity. Likewise, she became famous as an art critic. She then became known as a feminist and suffragette. In the second case, Cáceres analyzes Peruvian and European art. In this note her pride of Inca art derived from the Royal Commentaries of Inca Garcilaso becomes one with the Eurocentric myth known as El Dorado is considered. The focus is a talk that she offered at the University of Paris about Inca art with an ideological position that favored El Dorado as part of the capitalist desire. Capitalist desire, in this case, implies the European powers' interest in extracting natural resources from countries that they consider peripheral. It is paradoxical for the Peruvian nation that Cáceres, daughter of a Peruvian president, reader of Inca Garcilaso, seems to favor neocolonialism in the extraction of the country's natural resources.