Art from a Fractured Past

Cynthia E. Milton is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Latin American History at the UniversitÉ de MontrÉal. She is the author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador and a coeditor of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places and The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule.

• Introduction. Art from Peru's Fractured Past / Cynthia E. Milton Part One. Visual Representations of Recent Pasts 1. Images of Truth: Rescuing Memories of Peru's Internal War through Testimonial Art / Cynthia E. Milton 2. Chungui: Ethnographic Drawings of Violence and Traces of Memory / Edilberto Jiménez Quispe 3. Narrating Stories, Representing Memories: Retablos and Violence in Peru / María Eugenia Ulfe Part Two. Telling Stories of Political Violence 4. Violence, Guilt, and Repetition: Alonso Cueto's Novel La Hora Azul / Víctor Vich 5. Rupay: (Hi)stories of Political Violence in Peru, 1980–1984 / Luis Rossell, Alfredo Villar, and Jesús Cossio 6. Ayacuchano Cinema and the Filming of Violence: Interview with Palito Ortega Matute / Ponciano del Pino Part Three. Performing a Fractured Past 7. Commemorative Paths in Sacsamarca / Ricardo Caro Cárdenas 8. Colliding with Memory: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani's Sin Título, Técnica Mixta / Cynthia M. Garza 9. The "Voice of the Victims": Testimonial Songs in Rural Ayachucho / Jonathan Ritter Afterword. The Artist's Truth: The Post-Auschwitz Predicament after Latin America's Age of Dirty Wars / Steve J. Stern Bibliography Contributors Index

"Are there limits to representation? Is it possible to convey experiences that were unbearable, unspeakable, and inhuman? This collection's presentation and discussion of grounded, micro-level studies of Peruvian artistic representations show that in spite of all, people can and do express their feelings about violence and horror."-Elizabeth Jelin, author of State Repression and the Labors of Memory "Cynthia E. Milton's stunning, inter-disciplinary collection illuminates how art intervenes in the memory of politics and the politics of memory in post-civil conflict Peru."-Diana Taylor, author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas "This is a fascinating collection of essays about individual and collective memories in the aftermath of the violence that plagued Peru from 1980 until the mid-1990s. One of the richest collections available on the workings of memory in post-traumatic societies, it illuminates the complex and changing ways in which people recall and represent their experiences with violence, war, human rights violations, silencing, and exclusion."-Carlos Aguirre, author of The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935 “Among other fields, this book represents a timely and important contribution to scholarship on the relationship between memory and art in post conflict societies, Latin American popular cultures and, of course, recent Peruvian history and culture.” - Patricia Oliart (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies) “Milton’s volume succeeds in providing a smart and timely analysis of the rich array of artistic expressions that participate in the making of Peru’s post-conflict landscape.” - Joseph P. Feldman (Americas) "Art from a Fractured Past is a valuable compilation of works connected by the theme of the production of art in postwar Peru. It holds the reader’s attention by presenting art in its different forms of expression while showing how memory and truth-telling work in different ways, spaces, and periods." - Nathalie Koc Menard (Hispanic American Historical Review) "Cynthia Milton has gathered leading anthropologists, artists, literary theorists, musicologists, and historians, whose contributions compose a fascinating and coherent collection." - Katherine Hite (Latin American Research Review)