Priscilla Archibald's book is an in-depth consideration of the problematics of predominantly Peruvian, textual approaches to the endeavour of positioning indigeneity within modernity in the Andes from the 1920s to the end of the twentieth century. Indigenismo, of course, holds a key place in this discussion, and in this respect the book joins readings of this movement as one that brought debate about the nature and place of indigeneity into the centre of modern politics in the region. This interpretation of the movement has been informed by many studies since Efraín Kristal's inaugural The Andes Viewed from the City (Peter Lang, 1987), most recently by Jorge Coronado's The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society and Modernity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Archibald's book's chief contribution to this scholarship perhaps lies in its broader focus, for while the first chapter focuses on early indigenismo, subsequent developments of this endeavour take precedence in later chapters.

The book also addresses several cultural media in which modernity was and is ‘imagined’. The first chapter re-reads the indigenista essays of the 1920s, highlighting the way in which the much-discussed paradox of vindicating indigenous people and culture through integrating them into Western, text-based cultural forms did not impede the movement from being a productive force that changed the coordinates of modernity in the Andes. Chapter 3 discusses anthropology's approach to modernity in the 1950s; Archibald critiques the ‘applied anthropology’ model in vogue at that time and its application in the pilot developmental project that Cornell University organised in Vicos from 1952 onwards, contrasting its fundamentally acculturating ideal of ‘modernisation’ to José María Arguedas’ understudied anthropological work of the same period. ‘Indigenous video’ is considered in the concluding section, the new medium and process of production – by the ‘Andeans themselves’ (p. 17) – representing, for the author, the potential to overcome some of the paradoxes of text-based approaches to positioning indigeneity in relation to modernity.

The book's emphasis, however, is solidly on the literary. The second chapter looks at indigenista literature up to the 1940s, from the work of Enrique López Albújar to Jorge Icaza and Ciro Alegría, contrasting its increasingly Westernising literary mode with Arguedas’ first novel, Yawar Fiesta. Through the lens of more contemporary Peruvian literature, the last two chapters investigate the effect of the vast immigration of Andeans to coastal cities in the second half of the twentieth century on the positioning of indigeneity in modernity. Readings of texts by Alfredo Bryce, Carmen Ollé and Mario Vargas Llosa document the disruption to text-based understandings of modernity that this demographic change entailed, and interpreting Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos leads to a discussion of the possibilities for a redemptive re-articulation. Lastly, analysis of Arguedas’ El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo allows for a consideration of the potential of the contemporary Peruvian metropolis to be the site of a desirable ‘transculturation’.

The more compelling parts of this study are those in which Archibald detects, in images of violence and of the grotesque within Peruvian indigenista and non-indigenista literature, unsettlement and disarray in the Westernising political imagination. Archibald associates this with the presence of a ‘cultural difference’ (p. 58) that the placing of indigeneity as a passive subalternity has been unsuccessful in smoothing over. These readings will make the book of interest to any who are concerned with the work of the authors contemplated. Principally, Archibald's consistent presentation of Arguedas’ work as opening ways of thinking about how to de-link ‘indigenous agency from subalternity’ (p. 76) will no doubt be a point of dialogue for further reconsiderations of his work. Perhaps the most fertile idea connecting these readings is that of the paradoxical structure central to indigenismo as something that goes beyond the movement itself, and thus ‘stimulates rather than forecloses political imagination’ (p. 50). Archibald is sensitive in every chapter to ‘the ideological significance of certain meaningful flaws’ (p. 110) in the endeavour to imagine modernity in the Andes, and as a result her readings succeed in revealing the ongoing dynamism of many of these texts for thinking about this issue today.

More problematic, though, is Archibald's notion of an agency that withstands Westernising trends but that is rooted in ‘cultural difference’ or indigeneity. It sits rather uncomfortably alongside her acknowledgement that indigeneity is an invention of colonialism (p. 20), and therefore not an innocent category but surreptitiously linked to subalternity. Despite acknowledging the notion of identity as something that can change over time and even become disassociated from racial categories, the idea of a transformative agency rooted in the symbolically, historically, ideologically loaded category of the indígena comes across as under-theorised. Likewise, readers expecting an explicit, structured consideration of what the term ‘modernity’ means, and how the notion is informed or challenged by the texts considered or by ‘indigenous agency’, will be disappointed; the focus on the literary and the textual also means that there is silence as to other modes in which modernity is brought about and its effects on Peruvian society, such as historical developments in infrastructure and technology. This means that, while the detailed reading of texts works well, the overall thesis of the book in relation to the possibility of a transformative politics or alternative modernity rooted in ‘cultural difference’ remains at the level of an indistinct optimism. That this problematic remains unresolved is highlighted in the final chapter's engagement with Alberto Moreiras’ more pessimistic view of ‘transculturation’ as a word that describes a crisis of meaning brought about by a homogenisation of cultural difference; indeed, it is not so much a blind spot as a discussion whose inconclusiveness needs to be highlighted. In this sense, in the same way as it rightly identifies the productivity of certain tensions within indigenismo, Imagining Modernity in the Andes could be productive in stimulating thought and debate about the still unresolved question of how to overcome colonial legacies in the Andes.