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.