Guest editor, Special Issue of Siglo Diecinueve (Universitas Castellae, Valladolid, Spain): Topic: “España en América, América en España.” Forthcoming Spring 2008.

“Sombras sublimes: Conquista, nacionalismo y subjetividad infantil en La biblioteca del niño de Heriberto Frías (1899-1901)” in Siglo Diecinueve.

“Professor Avatar” Inside Higher Ed. October 16, 2007.

“Ignacio Manuel Altamirano and the Contradictions of Autobiographical Indianism.” Forthcoming Latin American Literary Review (Bilingual Press).“Letras combatientes: relectura de la Gaceta de Caracas, 1808-1822.”Revista Iberoamericana Num. 214, Enero-Marzo 2006.

“The Incomplete American.” A Contracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America. Vol. 3, No. 3, Spring 2006. Full text in PDF.

“Our office.” Inside HigherEd (April 2006).

“The Limits of Analogy: José Martí and the Haymarket Anarchists”. A Contracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America. Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2004.

“Próspero y el Teatro Nacional: Encuentros Trasatlánticos en las Revistas Teatrales de Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, 1867-1876.” Iberoamericana, March 2003.

“Poeta serpiente: el indigenismo chicano de Francisco Alarcón.” Insula: Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, July-August 2002.

“Cambaceres Meets Schopenhauer: The Ontology of Despair in Sin rumbo.” Romance Notes, Fall 2002.

“Gender, Empire and Revolution in La Victoria de Junín.” Hispanic Review, Summer 2001 69:3.

Coeditor of collection of articles “Ficciones Disciplinantes,” in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Año XXVI, No. 52. Lima-Hanover, 2000.

“Lecturas: Ventanas de la Seducción en El Zarco.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Año XXVI, No. 52. Lima-Hanover, 2000.

“Of Subjects and Cowboys: Frontier and History in Pedro Mir’s Countersong to Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 15.4, Spring 1998. 161-171.

“Itinerario del culto nacional: el fantasma de Bolívar.”Estudios: Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales. Año 6, July-December 1998, No. 12.

“José Martí Frente al Wild West de Buffalo Bill: Frontera, Raza y Arte en la Civilización y Barbarie Norteamericana.”Hispanic Journal. Vol 19.1, Spring 1998.

“Monumental Space and Corporeal Memory: Eduardo Blanco’s Venezuela Heroica (1881) and the Cult of Bolívar in Nineteenth Century Venezuela.” La Chispa ‘97: Selected Proceedings

“Espíritu de las leyes, espíritu bolivariano: apuntes sobre la diatriba en la obra de Simón Bolívar.” Torre de Papel, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1992. 40-50.

Balta’s presidency was largely ineffectual and characterized by corruption and wastefulness. One sector of Lima’s political and economic elite had begun to seriously question the centrality of the military in politics, opposing Balta and militarism in general. They represented the interests of the plutocracy that had attained economic affluence through guano, whether as merchants, financiers or landowners, and sought a larger role in managing guano profits and the national economy. They called themselves the Civilistas, and their presidential candidate and principal ideologue, Manuel Pardo, would win the presidency in 1872. During Balta’s presidency, Palma’s parlamentary speeches underline how far from Civilista ideology he truly was. Most notably, when a prospective monument to Jose Galvez was criticized for representing the hero as an individual, Palma defended his old mentor and the inclusion of individuated allegories in national monuments. When some senators, preoccupied by the lack of funds in state coffers, raised financial objections to proposals to provide recompense in the form of gold medals to the veterans of the Battle of Callao where the Spanish fleet was repelled, Palma was intransigent: “I do not understand how, in speaking of prizes and rewards, our lips pronounce the word economy.” The rejection of the word “economy” is revealing here, for it underlines Palma’s distrust of the classically liberal, and anti-militarist tenets of emergent Civilista ideology, which spurned Balta’s extravagant expenditures. In 1872, when President Balta was assassinated in a failed coup, Palma’s political career came to an end.

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The tradition is a hybrid narrative. It’s nucleus is an anecdote, but historical digressions and ironic and exclamatory authorial interventions are added to the mix. Even in traditions that do not seem particularly inventive in their theme or form (such as some of the more historiographic “monographs”) readers find historical discourse combined with anecdotal, autobiographical or humorous elements. In “The Protectress and the Liberatrix,” the biographies of Rosa Campuzano and Manuela S‡enz are framed by autobiographical anecdotes from Palma’s childhood and youth. “The Knights of the Cape” might have been a dry historical anecdote if not for Palma’s artful characterizations and humorous asides, such as the passage in which a would-be political assasin skirts a puddle on his way to “bathing” himself in human blood. On another level, the prevalent combination of different discourses in the Peruvian Traditions, which varies in degree and in kind in different texts, also underlines how Palma empowered his documentary research with the freedom of the imagination, producing fiction through his “historical” sourcework. In the “Magistrate’s Ears,” for example, Palma loosely based his narrative on a brief anecdote recounted in Sebastián de Lorente’s Historia del Perú bajo la dinastía austriaca, 1542-1598 (1863). In Lorente’s concise narrative, a soldier of noble descent named Aguirre receives a humiliating lashing by order of a magistrate of Potos’ for failing to pay a fine. Fearing reprisal from Aguirre, the magistrate fled to Lima, only to be murdered three years later with a stab wound to the right temple. Palma changes the names, introduces the thematic nucleus of the ears of the magistrate, dramatizes events by having the dishonored noblemen insinuate his threats to the magistrate on several separate ocassions, and changes the very outcome of the original story: instead of being murdered, the magistrate loses his ears to his attacker and dies later of humiliation. Clearly, Palma was not limited by his original source, but rather used it as a frame for his own invention; like a good tailor (one of his favorite metaphors for his work as a tradicionista), Palma delighted in “sewing” together different types of discourse.

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