Anne Lambright
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781382516
- eISBN:
- 9781786945471
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781382516.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru studies how literature, drama, film, and the visual arts contest the dominant narrative of national ...
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Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru studies how literature, drama, film, and the visual arts contest the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Established in 2001, the Commission aimed to ‘investigate and make public the truth’ of the country’s twenty-year civil war, drawing upon homologous predecessors that provided a highly scripted model of truth-gathering and national healing. In this model, a predetermined collective mourning, catharsis, and reconciliation would move the nation forward in a consensually-determined fashion. Andean Truths shows that the Peruvian case proves internationally-endorsed models insufficient for arriving at the ‘truth’ of a national trauma that primarily affected disenfranchised ethnic groups, namely, the Andean Quechua speaking populations that accounted for the overwhelming majority of victims of the violence. Even as scholars recognize the importance of bringing multiple voices to the table in discussing post-Shining Path Peru, the question remains of what a more Andean-oriented transitional justice process might entail. Drawing on theories of decoloniality, intercultural communication and epistemological diversity (following scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos), this book analyzes cultural products, from the theater of Yuyachkani to the narrative of Oscar Colchado Lucio, the art of Edilberto Jiménez, and other popular artistic responses, that highlight Andean understandings of the conflict and its aftermath. These cultural products challenge dominant understandings of the conflict and question Peru’s ability to overcome its collective trauma without seriously reconsidering prevailing cultural paradigms.Less
Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru studies how literature, drama, film, and the visual arts contest the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Established in 2001, the Commission aimed to ‘investigate and make public the truth’ of the country’s twenty-year civil war, drawing upon homologous predecessors that provided a highly scripted model of truth-gathering and national healing. In this model, a predetermined collective mourning, catharsis, and reconciliation would move the nation forward in a consensually-determined fashion. Andean Truths shows that the Peruvian case proves internationally-endorsed models insufficient for arriving at the ‘truth’ of a national trauma that primarily affected disenfranchised ethnic groups, namely, the Andean Quechua speaking populations that accounted for the overwhelming majority of victims of the violence. Even as scholars recognize the importance of bringing multiple voices to the table in discussing post-Shining Path Peru, the question remains of what a more Andean-oriented transitional justice process might entail. Drawing on theories of decoloniality, intercultural communication and epistemological diversity (following scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos), this book analyzes cultural products, from the theater of Yuyachkani to the narrative of Oscar Colchado Lucio, the art of Edilberto Jiménez, and other popular artistic responses, that highlight Andean understandings of the conflict and its aftermath. These cultural products challenge dominant understandings of the conflict and question Peru’s ability to overcome its collective trauma without seriously reconsidering prevailing cultural paradigms.
Anne Lambright
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781382516
- eISBN:
- 9781786945471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781382516.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This chapter examines the theatrical interventions by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Peru’s premier popular theater collective, at the CVR’s public hearings in Huanta and Huamanga. From an established ...
More
This chapter examines the theatrical interventions by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Peru’s premier popular theater collective, at the CVR’s public hearings in Huanta and Huamanga. From an established repertoire on Peruvian cultural heterogeneity, ethnic and gendered violence, and the war, Yuyachkani presented two plays whose protagonists are dead (one indigenous male, one mythic female) and called upon more (indigenous) dead when creating new pieces to accompany the endeavor, suggesting that after years of sustained—real and symbolic—violence, only the dead can embody the national situation, serve as the nation’s memory, and bridge individual and collective trauma. Challenging the therapeutic efforts of the CVR, dead bodies of marginalized subjects, and their ghosts, serve to explore collective and individual trauma, and mediate between the people and the state.Less
This chapter examines the theatrical interventions by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Peru’s premier popular theater collective, at the CVR’s public hearings in Huanta and Huamanga. From an established repertoire on Peruvian cultural heterogeneity, ethnic and gendered violence, and the war, Yuyachkani presented two plays whose protagonists are dead (one indigenous male, one mythic female) and called upon more (indigenous) dead when creating new pieces to accompany the endeavor, suggesting that after years of sustained—real and symbolic—violence, only the dead can embody the national situation, serve as the nation’s memory, and bridge individual and collective trauma. Challenging the therapeutic efforts of the CVR, dead bodies of marginalized subjects, and their ghosts, serve to explore collective and individual trauma, and mediate between the people and the state.
