Self-Consciousness, Decoloniality and Pluriversal Thinking in Augusto Monterroso's Literary Production

Abstract

Eurocentrism, coloniality and race have been largely absent from the small body of scholarship dedicated to the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso. Analyzing his literary production from La oveja negra (1969) to La vaca (1995), I make the case for reading behind the scenes of Monterroso’s short narrative into a much more ambitious literary-political project that anticipates what Quijano, Mignolo, Escobar and others would later term “decoloniality”. Through critique of cultural distinction, irreverence towards knowledge production, and self-reflexive satire that turns him as (white male) author into the butt of his own jokes, Monterroso uses his tiny tales to open cracks in colonial knowledge through which the reader might glimpse the pluriverse.