Mining Memory

Every major Peruvian author of the twentieth century has written a narrative focused on childhood or coming of age. Mining Memory argues that Peruvian narratives of the twentieth century re-imagine childhood not only to document personal pasts, but also to focus on national identity as a dynamic and incomplete process. Mining Memory shows how 20th-century narratives and films reimagine the self and the nation by representing child and adolescent protagonists and their evolution, using the remembrance of childhood as part of a nation-making project. The book demonstrates how, in the context of Peru, fictions focusing on childhood become vehicles for the national reimagining and collective remembering central to much of Latin American literature.The figure of the child, as emblem of both a collective memory and an always deferred utopian project, holds special promise for twentieth-century Peruvian writers as they write from a national context rife with cultural, racial and political conflict. The book intervenes in debates internal to Peruvian cultural studies as well as wider conversations in Latin American Studies and post-colonial studies. Mining Memory provides a new understanding to both the Latin American and Anglo-American traditions regarding the representations of national subjectivities through the voices of the child and adolescent. Such a representational strategy performs a very particular kind of hybridity and temporal balancing act capable of addressing the very issues of cultural memory and fractured identities so relevant to multi-cultural, post-colonial cultural contexts.

IntroductionNarrating the Child as National SubjectGeographies of ChildhoodThe Politics of Memory and EmotionChapter One. On Writing a National Child: Migrant Subjectivity and the Heterogeneous NationThe Indigenous Within: Los ríos profundosThe Other Side of Criollo Subjectivity: Un mundo para JuliusChapter Two. Childhood Homes and Foundational History: Local Identities in National and Global LandscapesLocal Agencies on the National Stage in De mi casonaFrom Local to Global in País de JaujaChapter Three. The Child Between: Geographies of Childhood and the Role of Critical MemoryRemembering Childhood through Text and Image in Miguel Gutiérrez's La destrucción del reinoNarrative and Critical Memory in Ximena de dos caminosChapter Four. Chronicles of Childhood: On the Politics of Nostalgia and EmotionRemembering Home: A Return to the Subjective in Entre el amor y la furia (1997)Nostalgic Affect and Countermemory in Más allá de la ventanaChapter Five. Children at the Margins: The Abject and National CommunitiesSnapshots of the Margins: "Los gallinazos sin plumas" and Caídos del cieloDeath and Resistance from the Margins: MontacerdosChapter Six. Remembering and Dismembering Gendering: Performing Adolescence in Word and ImageDismembering and Remembering Pichula CuéllarIn and About Homosexuality in No se lo digas a nadieConclusion. Childhood, Past and Future: New Feminine Political Agencies and CulturalCitizenship on FilmBibliography