Art from a Fractured Past

"Cynthia E. Milton's stunning, inter-disciplinary collection illuminates how art intervenes in the memory of politics and the politics of memory in post-civil conflict Peru."— - Diana Taylor, author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas

"This is a fascinating collection of essays about individual and collective memories in the aftermath of the violence that plagued Peru from 1980 until the mid-1990s. One of the richest collections available on the workings of memory in post-traumatic societies, it illuminates the complex and changing ways in which people recall and represent their experiences with violence, war, human rights violations, silencing, and exclusion." - Carlos Aguirre, author of The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935

"Are there limits to representation? Is it possible to convey experiences that were unbearable, unspeakable, and inhuman? This collection's presentation and discussion of grounded, micro-level studies of Peruvian artistic representations show that in spite of all, people can and do express their feelings about violence and horror." - Elizabeth Jelin, author of State Repression and the Labors of Memory

"Brings to light the wide-ranging possibilities of artistic language and the images to which people who lived through political violence in Peru have turned." - Fiona Wilson, Journal of Latin American Studies

“Among other fields, this book represents a timely and important contribution to scholarship on the relationship between memory and art in post conflict societies, Latin American popular cultures and, of course, recent Peruvian history and culture.” - Patricia Oliart, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

“Milton’s volume succeeds in providing a smart and timely analysis of the rich array of artistic expressions that participate in the making of Peru’s post-conflict landscape.” - Joseph P. Feldman, Americas

"Art from a Fractured Past is a valuable compilation of works connected by the theme of the production of art in postwar Peru. It holds the reader’s attention by presenting art in its different forms of expression while showing how memory and truth-telling work in different ways, spaces, and periods." - Nathalie Koc Menard, Hispanic American Historical Review

"This book clearly demonstrates the productivity of engaging with this expanded notion of the archive for the Peruvian case, showing how an attentive engagement with the practices of artists-survivors, who emerge from or work within the very communities that suffered through the conflict, can bring to light a more nuanced understanding of the racialized, gendered and generational impacts of political violence." - Florencia Marchetti, Topia

"Cynthia Milton has gathered leading anthropologists, artists, literary theorists, musicologists, and historians, whose contributions compose a fascinating and coherent collection." - Katherine Hite, Latin American Research Review

"Milton’s volume is an important contribution to the field of memory studies, applying frameworks well-developed in literature on dirty wars in the Southern Cone.  . . . It opens up new lines of inquiry to analyze the limitations of and possibilities for reconciliation in a nation still marked by stark regional, ethnoracial, and socio-economic disparities." - Dan S. Cozart, The Latin Americanist