The Role of Photography in Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Process

The Role of Photography in Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Process
Author: Robin E. Hoecker
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2007
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

Using the methods of semi-structured personal interviews and a post test-only experiment, this study examined the creation and effects of a photography project initiated by the Commission of Peru. The interviews revealed how the project came to be and how it was put together. When selecting photographs, the curators had two goals in mind: reconstructing the chronology of the conflict as well as communicating the suffering of the victims. The quantitative results indicate that the exhibit is having the desired effects. A post test-only experiment (n=109) measured the effects of viewing the photographs on four variables of reconciliation: truth, forgiveness, trust in government and resentment. The study found that viewing the photographs increased respondents' confidence that they understood the truth about the conflict, but did not have any effect on their levels of trust in government or resentment. For those people who experienced traumatic events, viewing the photographs helped them to forgive. In contrast, respondents who did not experience traumatic events forgave less after seeing the pictures. Drawing from conflict theory, the study explores the role that photography could play in the reconciliation process on both national and personal level.

Landscape and Collective Memory in Post-conflict Ayacucho, Peru

Landscape and Collective Memory in Post-conflict Ayacucho, Peru
Author: Kirk A. Walker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2018
Genre: Ayacucho (Peru)
ISBN:

Peru was enveloped in an internal armed conflict from 1980 to 2000. The Shining Path, a militant communist group, sought to revolutionize Peru through violence. Indigenous Peruvians were targeted in extrajudicial massacres and killings. Nearly 70,000 people, mostly indigenous, were either killed or disappeared by both the Shining Path and government military forces (CVR 2004). Today, post-conflict Peru still grapples with the human rights violations of the past and is challenged to achieve reconciliation. For the victims of violence, how the memory of the conflict is conveyed is an important element of the transitional justice process (Alexander et al. 2004). My interdisciplinary research explores collective memory, the shared representation of the past that is socially constructed by a group of people (Halbwachs 1992). The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified the region of Ayacucho as the epicentre of violence during the conflict (CVR 2004, 21).

Art from a Fractured Past

Art from a Fractured Past
Author: Cynthia E. Milton
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2014-02-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822377462

Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission not only documented the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s but also gave Peruvians a unique opportunity to examine the causes and nature of that violence. In Art from a Fractured Past, scholars and artists expand on the commission's work, arguing for broadening the definition of the testimonial to include various forms of artistic production as documentary evidence. Their innovative focus on representation offers new and compelling perspectives on how Peruvians experienced those years and how they have attempted to come to terms with the memories and legacies of violence. Their findings about Peru offer insight into questions of art, memory, and truth that resonate throughout Latin America in the wake of "dirty wars" of the last half century. Exploring diverse works of art, including memorials, drawings, theater, film, songs, painted wooden retablos (three-dimensional boxes), and fiction, including an acclaimed graphic novel, the contributors show that art, not constrained by literal truth, can generate new opportunities for empathetic understanding and solidarity. Contributors. Ricardo Caro Cárdenas, Jesús Cossio, Ponciano del Pino, Cynthia M. Garza, Edilberto Jímenez Quispe, Cynthia E. Milton, Jonathan Ritter, Luis Rossell, Steve J. Stern, María Eugenia Ulfe, Víctor Vich, Alfredo Villar

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation
Author: Melissa Miles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000213226

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation charts the connections between photography and a crucial issue in contemporary social history. The book examines the prevalence of photography in cultural responses to processes of truth and reconciliation, and argues that photographs are a valuable means through which stories can be retold and historiography can be rethought. Five compelling case studies from Argentina, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Cambodia underscore the special role that this medium has played in facilitating processes of recovery, and in reconstructing suppressed histories, even when a documentary record of the events does not exist. The diverse practices addressed in this book – including artistic, protest, institutional, archival, legal and personal photography – prompt a new consideration of photography’s links to presence, place, time, spectatorship and justice. Collectively, these practices attest to photography’s key role in transitional justice, and in shaping historical understanding internationally. Important reading for students taking photography, visual culture, history and media studies courses, Photography, Truth and Reconciliation explores key historical and theoretical themes, including photography and testimony, international discourses on human rights and justice, and problematic notions of public and collective memory. The introduction and conclusion of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Memory Matters in Transitional Peru

Memory Matters in Transitional Peru
Author: M. Saona
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 113729017X

Commemorating traumatic events means attempting to activate collective memory. By examining images, metonymic invocations, built environments and digital outreach interventions, this book establishes some of the cognitive and emotional responses that make us incorporate the past suffering of others as a painful legacy of our own.

Framing the Victim

Framing the Victim
Author: Lynn Marie Healy
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

Abstract: Although much has been written on the social, economic and political causes of the Peruvian armed internal conflict (1980-2000) and the difficulty in determining who should be counted as a victim during the conflict, there is a lacuna of research that considers how the victims of the violence are represented and recognized within the dominant public sphere. My project seeks to address this gap in the literature on Peru through an analysis of two organizations dedicated to the victims and their families, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC 2001-2003) and the National Association of the Family Members of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared in Peru, ANFASEP (1983-present). I draw from Judith Butler’s recent works on recognition and the public sphere and Homi Bhabha’s theories of performativity in order to assess how the PTRC and ANFASEP frame or represent the victims specifically along the lines of gender, the underlying assumptions that inform the frames used and the kind of recognition conferred to the victims as a result of that framing. I demonstrate how the PTRC fails to take up responsibly the voices and the experiences of the victims such that the victims of the violence are denied agency and presented in the public sphere on the basis of their passivity. Through the eschewal of narratives of victimization and an assertion of the humanity of their loved ones who were disappeared or murdered by the State, ANFASEP affirms the agency of its members as grieving mothers and wives who are actively engaged in battling for the recognition of their losses. My analysis focuses on narratives of the violence produced by the PTRC, including its Final Report, photographic installation and televised public hearings, in addition to ANFASEP’s five bulletins published during and just after the conflict, their testimonio, ¿Hasta cuando tu silencio?, and their museum in Ayacucho, Museo de la Memoria de ANFASEP, Para que no se repita. In Chapter 1 I present a review of the literature on the conflict, memory and gender in post-conflict Peru and elucidate the meanings of recognition, the public sphere and performativity. In Chapter 2 I focus on the five publications by ANFASEP during and just after the twenty years of violence and demonstrate how ANFASEP sought to make their losses recognizable in the public sphere and how they avoided the label of “victim”. In Chapter 3 I turn to the Final Report and online archive of photographs of the PTRC and demonstrate how the victims are represented as passive in the constructions about the violence and, ultimately, denied agency in these works. In Chapter 4 I look at personal and collective narratives of the violence and show how agency and recognition function or fail to function in the PTRC’s public hearings in comparison to ANFASEP’s testimonio and museum. I conclude with reflections on recent interventions in the debate on memory by children of the conflict and look toward the future of memory-making in Peru.

Latin American Identities After 1980

Latin American Identities After 1980
Author: Gordana Yovanovich
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2010-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1554583004

Latin American Identities After 1980 takes an interdisciplinary approach to Latin American social and cultural identities. With broad regional coverage, and an emphasis on Canadian perspectives, it focuses on Latin American contact with other cultures and nations. Its sound scholarship combines evidence-based case studies with the Latin American tradition of the essay, particularly in areas where the discourse of the establishment does not match political, social, and cultural realities and where it is difficult to uncover the purposely covert. This study of the cultural and social Latin America begins with an interpretation of the new Pax Americana, designed in the 1980s by the North in agreement with the Southern elites. As the agreement ties the hands of national governments and establishes new regional and global strategies, a pan–Latin American identity is emphasized over individual national identities. The multi-faceted impacts and effects of globalization in Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the Caribbean are examined, with an emphasis on social change, the transnationalization and commodification of Latin American and Caribbean arts and the adaptation of cultural identities in a globalized context as understood by Latin American authors writing from transnational perspectives.