Mining Memory: Reimagining Self and Nation through Narratives of Childhood in Peru(Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents:

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 ríos 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 País de Jauja
Chapter Three. The Child Between: Geographies of Childhood and the Role of Critical Memory
Remembering Childhood through Text and Image in Miguel Gutiérrez's La destrucción 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 Más allá de la ventana
Chapter Five. Children at the Margins: The Abject and National Communities
Snapshots of the Margins: "Los gallinazos sin plumas" and Caídos 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 Cuéllar
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

About the Author :
Mary Beth Tierney-Tello is professor of Hispanic Studies at Wheaton College.

Review :
This book explores the representations of childhood in 12 works of fiction and two films. Tierney-Tello (Wheaton College) studies notions of gender, geography, memory, and nation making, connecting these themes to construction and deconstruction of different aspects of Peruvian society. She argues that narratives of coming of age in Peru allow the reimaging of childhood not only to offer personal pasts but also as a national subject to propose nationwide identity and collective cultural memory as a problematic fractured process inside of a multicultural and multiethnic, disrupted society. The author analyzes accounts of childhood that speak about historical, social, and political difficulties revealing inequality, racism, sexual prejudice, and profound cultural divisions in Peru. For Tierney-Tello, childhood fictional narratives offer a unique multiplicity of perspectives and insights on the past, present, and future of the national historical discourse. The author builds on Benedict Anderson's perspectives on nation forming processes and Antonio Cornejo Polar’s point of view on fictional migrant subjectivity in Peru. This book will probably be of greatest interest to scholars of the bildungsroman genre in Peru over the last century. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.