In recent years, prominent scholar-activists such as Wade Davis and Jessie Little Doe Baird have shone a welcome light on the need to revive and preserve indigenous languages in the Americas. However, an earlier generation of authors and educators who struggled to promote native literacies in the first half of the twentieth century has often been overlooked in the history of the modern native-language revival. In this slender gem of a book, noted scholar Alan Durston seeks to redress this imbalance by providing new insights into the Peruvian writers and academics who created the Quechua literary boom from 1920 to 1960.
During the four decades covered in this volume, new genres of Quechua literature took shape. Most notable among these was the rise of folkloric theater that focused on portraying the lives of actual Andean peasants rather than the romanticized images of Inca nobility popular in previous centuries. The authors...
