War and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Recent Work in Peru and Argentina

Abstract

At a recent festival of Quechua theatre in Peru, one of the plays took as its theme the widespread disappearance of people in the Emergency Zones, where the state is engaged in what is known as a dirty war with the forces of the Communist Part of Peru, better known as Sendero Luminoso. Disappearances have occurred over the past two decades in a large number of Latin American countries. How does one investigate their cultural effect? For a start, they imply a network of threats, silences and other invasions of violence into the web of symbolic production. In the play I refer to, the stage is divided into three simultaneous spaces: one of them shows a young man being taken away by the army; in the second, his family are weeping for the absent son; in the third, the dead man himself appears and recounts his experience. Obviously, the multiplication of spaces comes out of the need to recompose a divided reality, where memory, communication and knowledge have been broken into fragments. What is most moving is perhaps the presence of the dead man on the stage; the dead, in this circumstance, are memory and without the accumulations of memory there is no culture. Clearly, without social memory there can be no ethics. Historically the state has presented itself as guarantor of order and meaning, offering itself, as Pedro Morandé shows, as coherent body in the face of the chaos of discintinuity (Morandé 1987, 95-96). And yet if the state cannot exist without its representation of continuities, these are selective, since we find states engaged in the deliberate creation of social amnesia.