Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post–Shining Path Peru

Between 1980 and 2000, an internal armed conflict took place in Peru that claimed approximately 70,000 victims. Art from a Fractured Past, a compilation edited by Cynthia Milton, explores how Peruvian people have used art in this war's aftermath to express inexpressible feelings and memories about its traumatic events and to make sense of and work through this past. The book's contributions are connected by two important threads: the repercussions of the war on individuals, and memory and truth telling. The exposition of these artworks in the public sphere allows the voices of the war's victims, 75 percent of whom were native indigenous Quechua speakers, expression in an environment that normally excludes and discriminates against them. This challenges Peru's hierarchy of power, in which indigenous people are generally either silenced or represented by others. Thus through this art, Peru's traditional sociopolitical...