Description
- Abstract:
- Taking Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (~1980-2000) and its many “struggles of voice” (Lucero 2008) as case study, the present dissertation looks to examine the literary production of writers who have found themselves both excluded from Peruvian literary establishments and othered by these establishments’ post/Conflict discourses. This includes authors from rural territories; those who identify as Indigenous or who are of Indigenous origin; those who identify as women; and those who have ties to Sendero Luminoso. Conflictive Voices actively problematizes Peru’s notoriously white, male, and coastal “Conflict Canon,” all the while elevating voices that should be at the forefront of Conflict-related literary production. The dissertation closely considers questions of representation, while acknowledging that the elevation alone of historically marginalized voices cannot undo hegemonic imaginings of othered subjectivities. To this end, the dissertation prioritizes the inclusion of writers from marginalized communities who actively contest hegemonic Conflict discourses and the networks of literary circulation that sustain them. This contestation can take many forms, often extending into the realm of the extra-literary, but at the very least it implies a conscious deviation from the hegemonic, a looking elsewhere towards other referents, discourses, readers, and markets. Conflictive Voices sustains that to look and write elsewhere in the specific context of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict adds to the radicality of these authors’ gestures. Where the Conflict and its aftermaths – including their uptake by literary establishments – have come to represent a boiling over of intersecting violences and inequities, treating it from a decentralized, decolonial, antiracist, and/or feminist position represents an especially charged form of literary activism. The dissertation suggests that these various affronts to the hegemonic speak to the importance of addressing the Conflict as more than a question of memory, but equally as a catalyst for enacting significant social change. Thus, and via its reading of the featured authors, Conflictive Voices proposes that to narrate the Conflict requires grappling with dysfunction at the level of the Nation-state. And central to this dysfunction is the muffling, if not quite the silencing, of individual voices for reasons race, ethnicity, gender, province of origin, or political affiliation.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2022
Citation
Renker, Tess,
"Conflictive Voices: Authorship, Authority, and Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict"
(2022).
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:p46d9ebv/
Relations
Collection:
-
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department....