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- Convenors:
-
James Scorer
(University of Manchester)
Charlotte Gleghorn (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Paul McAleer (University of Hull)
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- Location:
- ATB G113
- Start time:
- 12 April, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel analyses the influence of indigeneity on Peruvian cultural imaginaries and practices. Engaging with diverse theories of transculturation, it asks how the Indian dismantles, disrupts or underpins cultural products, forms and policies as part of a struggle over power structures.
Long Abstract:
Variously represented as a retrograde figure of the pre-Columbian past, a celebratory exemplar of an authentic and pure national identity, and a representative of a radical force for the future, the Indian has long influenced - whether wittingly or otherwise - cultural imaginaries, practices and aesthetics in Peru. Despite having no unified Indigenous movement, Peruvian culture continually recycles the figure of the Indian, a mobilisation demonstrative of the highly contested role of indigenous populations within ongoing reconfigurations of the nation-state.
Participating in the construction and contestation of global, national and regional identities and power structures, culture is a privileged site for evaluating struggles over hegemonic 'language[s] of contention' (Larson, 2004: 13). Working with, around and against theories of transculturation, hybridity and mestizaje, therefore, this panel will engage with diverse art forms to address the changing impact of indigeneity on Peruvian culture. Papers will include analysis of photography and indigenismo in the 1930s and 1940s, the depiction of religious customs in the work of Ciro Alegría, and contemporary indigenous film productions and festivals. Though the lived experience of indigeneity provides context to the analysis, the focus is rather on how indigeneity is framed; that is, when and how the imagined - or, indeed, imaginary - Indian is made visible and 'invisible'.
The panel welcomes papers addressing all or some of the issues set out here, not least those that look at cultural forms not mentioned above (e.g. art, comics, music, etc.), or that compare Peru to other Latin American or global contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
My paper analyses the representation of Indigenous subjects in El Perú Ilustrado against the background of contemporary discourses on Indigeneity and conceptions of visuality. I explain the foundational role of its visual depictions and their relation with 20th-century Indigenista representations.
Paper long abstract:
Considered the first Peruvian illustrated magazine, El Perú Ilustrado (1887-1892) supported the modernizing programme put in place by Peruvian ruling classes during the national reconstruction that was carried out after the Pacific War (1879-1883). The magazine's general aim was 'to be an agent of progress'. As the title itself suggests, visuality was a key aspect. El Perú Ilustrado offered a multifaceted iconography that aimed to show the development of the country and become a visual archive of its history.
Peruvian subjects were depicted within clearly divided genres. 'Portraits' and 'types' were used to reproduce the social and racial hierarchies of contemporary society. While urban citizens were represented as independent individuals, indigenous people were shown as signs of categories. Significantly, the depiction of 'Indians' from the Amazon was larger in number than that of 'Indians' from the Andes. Reflecting the elite's political agenda of conquering and colonizing the uncharted jungle, the visual and verbal discourses on both Indigenous groups ambivalently shifted from exoticism to the need to forcefully civilize the primitive.
Drawing on El Perú Ilustrado's photography-based engravings, litho-photographs and texts on indigenous subjects, I will discuss, firstly, how these images articulated contemporary discourses of primitivism, degeneration and civilization; secondly, how the magazine used the 'documentary' function of photography to argue the almost scientific objectivity of its position; thirdly, the extent to which this magazine set the basis for later visual representations of Peruvian Indigenous subjects, such as the Indigenista depictions from the early 20th century and beyond.
Paper short abstract:
Part of a project to refashion national identities, ruins recur frequently in early- to mid-twentieth century Peruvian photography. This paper analyses what the presence of Indians in such images says about photography, archaeology and indigeneity in Peruvian visual culture during this period.
Paper long abstract:
During the first half of the twentieth century, Peruvian photographers worked alongside historians and archaeologists as part of a widespread fascination with pre-Colombian ruins. For many Peruvian intellectuals, Inca ruins offered a unique and concrete set of motifs around which national and regional identities could be refashioned in the face of the rapid and destabilising transformations brought about by mechanisation, modernisation and land reform.
In this paper I will look at the role of photography within this project of mobilising ruins, focusing especially on the presence of Indians in images that include ruined sites. On the one hand, photography was used as a scientific tool that lent visual authority to written documentary research. In such images indigenous figures were scientific yardsticks for the photographic gaze: literal and metaphorical measuring tools, they lent an aura of authenticity to both image and ruin. On the other, however, expedition and society photographers documented ruins as the site for lunch breaks, outings, and party gatherings. As vestiges of the past, ruins in these photographs are no longer objects of scientific study or sacrosanct spaces of the Inca past. Instead, they become sites of habitation and engagement.
What role, therefore, do indigenous figures play in this photographic corpus? Are they ever transformed from objects of the past into active stakeholders in the photographic project of ongoing presence? And what does their inclusion in more quotidian, playful images of ruins do in terms of their political and cultural agency?
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the relationship between the myths of genesis of Andean/Quechuan culture, as identified in the anthropological work of Rulfo Kulsch, and the story, structures and symbols in Ciro Alegría’s novels, Los perros hambrientos and El mundo es ancho y ajeno.
Paper long abstract:
Taking as a theoretical starting point Walter Mignolo's work on hybridity and the translanguaging of culture, this paper will argue that the meaning(s) of any text is dependent on the cultural perspective/knowledge through which an analysis is made. Its aim, therefore, is to examine the local/indigenous symbols and narrative structures that are inscribed within Alegría's two novels: Los perros hambrientos and El mundo es ancho y ajeno. In the first part, the paper will examine the symbols of transculturation in the novels, such as 'la serpiente' or 'San Isidro', that have acquired double meanings within the region (stemming from Western and Quechua mythology). In the second, it will analyse how the symbols and narrative structure of the novels re-articulate Quechuan/indigenous legends, concentrating mainly on the myth of genesis de-coded by the anthropologist, Rodolfo Kusch, from the manuscript created by Joan Santa Cruz Pachacuti yamqui Salcamayhua. In this respect, it will be argued that the reader must look beyond the codes of realism (the realist and indigenismo descriptions of Andean culture) and examine other aspects of the novels in order to locate the double-cultural codes that underpin them. As a conclusion, I shall explore the possibility that through such re-articulations of different codes the texts express a palimpsest of mentalities. As such, the paper challenges the notion of the subaltern and silenced indio by asserting that, in some examples, seemingly Western texts, like the novel, produced within the Andean region are very often constructed out of the local cultural paradigms that they are purported to have silenced or imagined.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the presence in the national imaginary of indigenous sportsmen and sportswomen in relation to the comic-strip 'Supercholo'.
Paper long abstract:
Sport in Peru has tended to be the domain of members of the white social elites and, since the 1920s, of Afro-Peruvians (notably in football, volleyball, boxing). Since the 1960s, however, there has been an increased presence of indigenous sporting figures in the national media, both in terms of men and women who excel in their chosen field and of fictional characters. Focusing on visual representations that have appeared in a variety of sources and media over recent decades, particular attention will be given to the place of Peruvian sporting figures in national competitions, and at international events such as the 2012 London Olympics. The presence or absence on such occasions will be considered in the context of 'Supercholo', the comic superhero who has featured in the Peruvian media during several periods of recent years. This study will consider the ways in which these representations contribute to the position of the indigenous in the contemporary national imaginary.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how Peruvian Indigenous video and Indigenous film festivals challenge, or not, existing imaginaries of indigeneity in Peru. Among other factors it examines how this category may disrupt the dominance of lo andino in the nation’s imaginary.
Paper long abstract:
The category of Indigenous film is widely contested, not least because it is often employed as a surrogate for a diverse array of formats and genres. Film festivals around the world utilise the term as a means to garner wider recognition for Native media, to assert difference in the face of processes of homogenisation, and to leverage funding to enable production. In Peru, this category poses particular challenges owing to the problematic usage of the signifier 'Indigenous'. As has been widely documented (cf. de la Cadena 2000), to speak of indigeneity in Peru is a complex and fraught process which differs markedly from the neighbouring contexts of Bolivia and Ecuador.
The distinctiveness of the Peruvian scenario is not arresting the desire for an Indigenous media movement, however, outwardly voiced in recent events such as the Premio Anaconda in Lima (2011), and the CLACPI International Indigenous Film and Video Festival in Colombia (2012). During these events mediamakers argue for the importance of self-determination through the image, with films such as Iskay yachay (Sacha Videastas, 2005), El perro del hortelano (2009) and La travesía del Chumpi (Fernando Valdivia, 2011) demonstrating a variety of thematics and aesthetic strategies. In the context of the recent international attention garnered by Claudia Llosa's films, this paper considers how Peruvian video productions that feature in Indigenous film festivals challenge, or not, existing imaginaries of indigeneity in Peru. How may this category reimagine the cultural landscape of Peru, disrupting the dominance of lo andino in the nation's imaginary?
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I consider how the singing stars that provide the faces of the commercial huayno music industry in Peru disrupt imaginaries of the Indian and of indigeneity.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I consider how the singing stars that provide the faces of the commercial huayno music industry in Peru disrupt imaginaries of the Indian and of indigeneity. Although the figure of the Indian in Peruvian culture has commonly been represented as retrograde, marginal, and incompatible with modernity producers and consumers of commercial huayno have fashioned an alternative public sphere that contests such an imaginary. However, while the 'hyper-real' Indian has often been conceived of as socially and biologically inferior s/he has frequently been viewed as culturally rich - the guardian of pure, essential, and authentic culture. Again, commercial huayno mounts a serious challenge to such essentialism as it makes little reference to cultural authenticity or reified difference. Indeed, mestizo, criollo, and traditionalist groups are likely to believe that huayno practitioners exhibit commercial crassness and represent the bad taste of an indigenous and inferior take on modernity that is not in keeping with their understanding of 'authentic' Andean culture. Thus, I examine how contradictory imaginings of the Indian are sustained and made invisible from different subject positions within complex systems of power. More broadly, I am interested in how the distribution of agency in the construction and contestation of contemporary indigenous imaginaries is affected by globalisation and Peru's firm embrace of neoliberalism.