Looking Elsewhere: Editorial Amartí’s (Re)presentation of Post/Conflict Ayacucho

Abstract

Since the onset of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (~1980-2000), Peruvian writers have worked to narrate often unspeakable violences, contributing to a still-developing “Conflict Canon.” Yet while the Conflict overwhelmingly impacted Indigenous individuals from the nation’s rural Andean highlands and jungle lowlands, Peru’s most critically acclaimed and bestselling narrations of Conflict predominantly belong to white men of means from Lima. These depictions of the civil war written for/from the capital frequently reproduce tired geo-racial imaginaries, taking their cue from Mario Vargas Llosa’s polemic analysis of the 1983 murder of eight Peruvian journalists at the highland community of Uchuraccay (Ayacucho). Ayacucho, the Peruvian department most intensely victimized by Conflict violences, frequently appears in these narrations as a racialized wasteland. While scholars have produced significant analyses of the non-literary cultural production of Ayacuchan victims of the Conflict, the present essay considers the short fiction of Ayacuchans Erika Cuadros and Livio Huaripaucar, whose stories appear together in Siete cuentos sin fin, published by Editorial Amartí (Ayacucho). Considering the narratives themselves together with Editorial Amartí’s promotional materials, Facebook posts, and media appearances, I suggest that the collection contests dominant geo-racial imaginaries, (re)presenting post-Conflict Ayacucho and its experience of civil war against the discourses of “bestseller” authors like Vargas Llosa. Crucially, I propose that Cuadros, Huaripaucar, and Editorial Amartí develop important “counterpublics” (Warner 2005) and, in doing so, achieve an antihegemonic symbiosis of content and form.