Staging Terror: Violence and the Aesthetics of Civil War in Contemporary Peru.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relation between aesthetics and the public sphere in Peru during the period of political violence (1980-2000) stemming from the conflict between the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist guerrilla organization the Shining Path and the Peruvian State. It focuses on the way in which images and narratives are produced in the name of the political by analyzing the cultural production surrounding the conflict as specific responses to the limits of the national-republican project of the 19th century. While both the state and the guerrilla group conceived the political in terms that hinged on an imposed definition of national identity, this concept was challenged from within the limits of each one of these projects, by a set of literary, visual and performance works. These works privileged a notion of the political as a means of emancipation, rather than as a national ideology or consensus. Thus, this study demonstrates how a set of works distanced themselves from the themes that dominated the official discussion about the conflict in order to propose the political as an ephemeral interruption of the national narrative that is at the core of the conflict. This thesis combines the analysis of works by renowned writers (Oscar Colchado Lucio, Julio Ortega) and visual and performance artists (Jesús Ruiz Durand, Lika Mutal, Elena Tejada, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani) with the production of poetry, posters, speeches, and propaganda by the members of the Shining Path. It also draws on theoretical contributions about politics (Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser), aesthetics (Walter Benjamin, Immanuel Kant), violence, revolution, and repression (Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucalt, Giorgio Agamben) as well as on Latin American historical and critical perspectives.