1. Disarming the Subject: Remembering War and Imagining Citizenship in Peru | Désarmer le sujet : souvenirs de la guerre et citoyenneté imaginée au Pérou
- Author:
- Kimberly Theidon
- Publication Date:
- 09-2016
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Cultures & Conflits
- Institution:
- Cultures & Conflits
- Abstract:
- War and its aftermath serve as powerful motivators for the elaboration and transmission of individual, communal, and national histories. These histories both reflect and constitute human experience by contouring social memory and producing truth effects. These histories use the past in a creative manner, combining and recombining elements of that past that serve to interests in the present. In this sense, the conscious appropriation of history involves both remembering and forgetting—both being dynamic processes permeated with intentionality. This essay explores the political use of the narratives being elaborated in rural villages in the department of Ayacucho regarding the internal war that convulsed Peru for some fifteen years. Each narrative has a political intent and assumes both an internal and external audience. Indeed, the deployment of war narratives has much to do with forging new relations of power, ethnicity, and gender that are integral to the contemporary politics of the region. These new relations impact the construction of democratic practices and the model of citizenship being elaborated in the current context.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, War, Citizenship, and Memory
- Political Geography:
- South America and Peru