Search

“DECLARACIONES DE MODERNIDAD” EN LA REVISTA PERUANA VARIEDADES (1908-1932)

This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining how the film deconst...

This essay focuses on a series of pictorial reportages on the city of Cuzco and the surrounding region published in the Peruvian illustrated magazine Variedades in 1924 and 1925. Looking at the interplay of the aesthetic and documentary value of photographs, I analyse how the reportages on Cuzco’s architecture and ruins contributed to the indigenista proposal of regional and national identity and how, in so doing, they articulated an idea of modernity which opposed the main narrative of Western modernization produced by the magazine. I argue that Variedades became the discursive place of an interplay between opposite ideas of modernity since it afforded its readers-viewers a dual, almost conflictive, experience. Moreover, I posit that the magazine ‘mediated’ the regional discourse for the Limeno readers through the discourses of tourism and the picturesque familiarizing them with those ‘unknown’ regions. By comparing the reportages with similar documents published in the same decade by the Argentine magaz...

This chapter analyzes Winaypacha [Eternity] (2017) made by Oscar Catacora from the region of Puno. As the first Peruvian film to be spoken entirely in the Aymara language, it tells the story of an elderly couple of indigenous peasants who live in an isolated and remote area of the Peruvian highlands. In order to assess its aesthetic and cultural innovations, the film is situated within both a local and global context, analyzing first how the film dialogues with Peruvian cinematic indigenismo, transcending its conventions through a focus on intimacy; and, second, how it engages with “slow cinema” through its dilated temporality.

Claudia Llosa's films Madeinusa (2006) and La Teta Asustada (2009) are two interesting case studies of representation of indigenous people in contemporary cinema. Madeinusa tells about an isolated Andean village and its encounter with ‘modernity’; La Teta Asustada depicts Andean migrants who moved to the outskirts of Lima after the Peruvian 1980s Dirty War. Despite the several prizes the films were awarded (La Teta Asustada, for example, was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin festival), their national and international reception gave rise to controversy over the ways in which indigenous people were portrayed. This essay analyses the patterns and roots of Llosa's representation of the Andean world. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of Llosa's works, 19th-century novels, and early-20th-century and contemporary visual works, I identify and discuss a number of cultural and aesthetic strategies in the films: the actualization of a colonialist-style discourse; the employment of pre-existing models o...

Este ensayo examina las dialecticas de hegemonia y resistencia implicadas en los discursos en torno a los crimenes. El estudio parte de la hipotesis de que toda construccion discursiva de la verdad estriba en un conjunto de saberes, principios de autoridad y formas de resistencia a la autoridad que revela importantes mecanismos sociales. A partir de esta premisa analizo algunos patrones significativos que aparecen en textos policiales de Poe (1809–1849), Piglia (1941) y Holmberg (1852–1937). Todos estos relatos revelan las dialecticas de hegemonia y resistencia propias de sus contextos; estas afectan las relaciones sociales (Poe), las logicas de poder (Piglia) o las formas del conocimiento (Holmberg), y se articulan a traves de dicotomias constantes: normal-anormal, orden-desorden, racional-irracional. Esta aproximacion me permite abordar problematicas de tres diferentes contextos historicos y proponer una lectura de los relatos policiales en terminos de historia cultural.This essay examines the dialectic...