Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru

FAIN: FB-56509-12

Anne Monroe Lambright
Trinity College (Hartford, CT 06106-3100)

Andean Truths is a book-length study of how literature, drama, film, and visual arts contest the narrative of recovery constructed by Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Peru's TRC drew upon predecessors that provided a highly scripted model of truth-gathering and national healing, in which a predetermined collective mourning, catharsis, and reconciliation would move the nation forward in a consensually-determined fashion. The Peruvian case proves this model insufficient for arriving at the "truth" of a national trauma that primarily affected disenfranchised ethnic groups. To call into question state-sponsored transitional justice efforts, I examine creative cultural products that highlight ethnicity and cultural heterogeneity. What many creative works provide are visions of the period that resist consumption, challenge dominant understandings of the era and question the nation's ability to overcome its collective trauma without reviewing dominant cultural paradigms.

Associated Products

Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru (Book)
Title: Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru
Author: Anne Lambright
Abstract: 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, we are still trying to understand 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), Lambright 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.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/59802
Publisher: Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

2016 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize
Date: 10/1/2016
Organization: Modern Language Association
Abstract: For an outstanding scholarly book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish American literatures and cultures

“Visiones del Perú posconflicto en ‘La teta asustada’: hacia nuevas posiciones éticas en un Nuevo Perú” (Article)
Title: “Visiones del Perú posconflicto en ‘La teta asustada’: hacia nuevas posiciones éticas en un Nuevo Perú”
Author: Anne Lambright
Abstract: This article studies Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film “La teta asustada,” which focuses on indigenous immigrants in Lima. In contrast to films like “Paloma de papel” (by Fabrizio Aguilar), which promote very traditional, objectifying images of rural indigenous culture, Llosa’s film emphasizes indigenous peoples as subjects of their own recovery. With over 40% of its dialogue in Quechua, the film highlights a modern indigenous community that does not seamlessly assimilate and paints a new national culture sustained by an inevitable heterogeneity of knowledges and practices. The essays argues that both thematically and aesthetically the film promotes a new ethical stance--of solidarity and accompaniment-- on the part of the non-indigenous viewers vis-a-vis modern indigenous subjects in post-Shining Path Peru.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://cla.umn.edu/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/hiol_17_09_lambright_visiones.pdf
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Hispanic Issues Online
Publisher: Hispanic Issues Online

“Las migraciones epistemológicas de Oscar Colchado Lucio: Una lectura de Rosa Cuchillo” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Las migraciones epistemológicas de Oscar Colchado Lucio: Una lectura de Rosa Cuchillo”
Author: Anne Lambright
Abstract: In this presentation, I study Rosa Cuchillo (1997), by prominent indigenous-mestizo writer, Oscar Colchado Lucío. This novel, narrated by three indigenous characters, portrays the inability of both the Shining Path guerrillas and the state to understand indigenous Andean culture. By channeling the therapeutic processing of the conflict through Andean characters and epistemologies, Rosa Cuchillo suggests that one possible outcome of Peru's internal conflict could be a cultural, if not political, Pachacutec—an Andean revolution.
Date: 10/08/2015
Conference Name: Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Peruanistas, Poitiers, France

“Entre la pérdida y el trauma transhistórico: ¿Por qué es tan difícil un Museo de la Memoria?” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Entre la pérdida y el trauma transhistórico: ¿Por qué es tan difícil un Museo de la Memoria?”
Author: Anne Lambright
Abstract: This paper examines the difficulty of creating a national memory museum in Peru, as seen in the obstacles faced before the official opening of the Lugar de la Memoria, Tolerancia e Inclusión Social (LUM) in Lima. I argue that the LUM’s troubles in part stem from a more generalized insistence, in the country’s official transitional justice efforts, on treating the internal conflict as a bracketable event, an interruption in the national historical continuum, as a trauma to be overcome and, even, as what pedagogues might call a teachable moment. The truth, a truth, of the past must be studied so that it not be repeated, as the omnipresent slogan reads. However, looking at the series of false starts or failures of the LUM, I ask if the greater truth might not lie in that very repetition, in the failures, if we insist on labeling them as failures, of the project.
Date: 05/23/2014
Conference Name: Latin American Studies Association Conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico

“Curating the Shining Path Era: Four Museum Efforts in Peru” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Curating the Shining Path Era: Four Museum Efforts in Peru”
Author: Anne Lambright
Abstract: I consider the Lugar de la Memoria, the national effort to memorialize the internal conflict that plagued Peru for the last two decades of the 20th century, in contrast to localized memory museums in Ayacucho, the area most deeply affected by the conflict.Drawing on the work of Dominick LaCapra, I argue that the national museum seeks to articulate the Shining PAth conflict as a specific loss, a historical trauma, while the local museums are more successful in articulating the era as transhistorical or structural trauma.
Date: 05/23/2015
Conference Name: Latin American Studies Association Conference. Chicago

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