The Air as a Decolonial Critique of Being in César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía

Abstract

Daly analyzes Peruvian César Calvo’s novel Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo (1981) to argue that the moving air, and not a stable place, is his decolonial starting point for being and knowing. Air begins the novel as an invisible container that facilitates a web of relationships between shamans, their seekers, humans, other species, the material, the immaterial, memories, hallucinations, and multiple temporalities. As Calvo argues, the air holds “other knowledges and other worlds,” that in Daly’s reading, present decolonial outsides to the “lettered city” and the linear temporality of Western modernity. Daly also underscores the potential of partial alliances between Calvo and the feminist philosopher of air, Luce Irigaray, via her comparative reading.