Using Art as Historical Evidence after Violence (post-Shining Path Peru in Comparative Perspective)

This paper focuses on art in post-Shining Path Peru in order to develop a theory and methodology about artistic representations in the aftermath of violence. The principal theoretical argument underlying this study is that art, as a form of communication that witnesses and recounts, may help us understand historical narratives of experience in “limit events,” a phrase that refers to extreme societal violence. By expanding the historian’s scope of inquiry to include artistic representations as a form of “truth-telling” in the aftermath of violence, this paper presents an innovative analytical model for the study of memory, truth, and violence, and tries to address some of the silences left in the wake of more official forms of inquiry, such as truth commissions and trials, and more “traditional” methodologies, such as textual analysis and oral history. Thus, this paper calls for an expansion of the archive to include other repositories of memory and history (LaCapra, 1998; Milton, 2007a; Stern, 2004; Taylor, 2003). Artistic representations further our understanding of violent histories by offering a diverse means for recounting the past. This study is based on several artistic media. By choosing to focus on artistic/visual memory in Peru, I hope to illuminate the ways in which art can recount the past, and indeed how venues of art can have an impact upon memory discourses in the public sphere, that is, the memory battles that take place within the cultural domain.