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.
Introduction Narrating the Child as National Subject Geographies of Childhood The Politics of Memory and Emotion Chapter One. On Writing a National Child: Migrant Subjectivity and the Heterogeneous Nation The Indigenous Within: Los rios profundos The Other Side of Criollo Subjectivity: Un mundo para Julius Chapter Two. Childhood Homes and Foundational History: Local Identities in National and Global Landscapes Local Agencies on the National Stage in De mi casona From Local to Global in Pais de Jauja Chapter Three. The Child Between: Geographies of Childhood and the Role of Critical Memory Remembering Childhood through Text and Image in Miguel Gutierrez's La destruccion del reino Narrative and Critical Memory in Ximena de dos caminos Chapter Four. Chronicles of Childhood: On the Politics of Nostalgia and Emotion Remembering Home: A Return to the Subjective in Entre el amor y la furia (1997) Nostalgic Affect and Countermemory in Mas alla de la ventana Chapter Five. Children at the Margins: The Abject and National Communities Snapshots of the Margins: "Los gallinazos sin plumas" and Caidos del cielo Death and Resistance from the Margins: Montacerdos Chapter Six. Remembering and Dismembering Gendering: Performing Adolescence in Word and Image Dismembering and Remembering Pichula Cuellar In and About Homosexuality in No se lo digas a nadie Conclusion. Childhood, Past and Future: New Feminine Political Agencies and Cultural Citizenship on Film Bibliography
