Untangling Memories of Violence: The Khipu in El rincón de los muertos (Alfredo Pita)
Vol: 3, Issue: 1
2025
- 33Usage
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Example: if you select the 1-year option for an article published in 2019 and a metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019. If you select the 3-year option for the same article published in 2019 and the metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
Citation Benchmarking is provided by Scopus and SciVal and is different from the metrics context provided by PlumX Metrics.
Metrics Details
- Usage33
- Abstract Views23
- Downloads10
Article Description
This research proposes a structural reading of El rincón de los muertos to decode and trace echoes to the khipu which are embedded throughout the novel. Contrary to a graphic writing system, the Incan empire’s khipu (khipu) was a mnemotechnic system—a three-dimensional communicative device, an archive of memory that recorded information using different colored strings, and a system of knots. Our concept of mnemonics is different than that of the indigenous communities who relied on oral tradition and specifically for khipu a khipukamayuq (reader of khipu), in a narrative and discursive manner, to reconstruct the message the khipu contained. This research explores why these trans-medial references are made and precisely what aspects of a khipu are ‘translatable’ via a written text. Pita’s novel, however, is a metaphoric ‘translation’ of this recording device, provided that an exact translation is impossible based on the textual limitations of a novel. The focus of my essay will be to demonstrate how certain elements of the khipu are translatable in the novel but in a metaphoric sense. El rincón de los muertos’ polyphonic narrative, explicit references to the khipu, and the novel’s structural components are a few of the several aspects that make a metaphoric comparison to a khipu plausible. Vicente, this literary work’s protagonist, figuratively attempts to piece together, or rather, untangle the frayed strands of the khipu — the lost, forgotten, and neglected narrative of the origins of violence in the Andes.
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