Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru [Hardcover]

What happens when concepts of truth, memory, and human rights are taken up and adapted by former perpetrators of violence? Peru has moved from the 1980s90s conflict between its armed forces and Shining Path militants into an era of open democracy, transitional justice, and truth and reconciliation commissions. Cynthia Milton reveals how Peru's military has engaged in a tactical cultural campaignvia books, films, museumsto shift public opinion, debate, and memories about the nation's violent recent past and its part in it.

Milton calls attention to fabrications of our post-truth era but goes further to deeply explore the ways members of the Peruvian military see their past, how they actively commemorate and curate it in the present, and why they do so. Her nuanced approach upends frameworks of memory studies that reduce military and ex-military to a predictable role of outright denial.

Reveals and analyzes how Peru's military elite have engaged in a cultural campaignvia memoirs, novels, films, museumsto shift public memory and debate about the nation's recent violent conflict and their part in it.

Brings to light how military 'entrepreneurs of memory' strategically place memory products in a memory marketplace. A major intervention in debates about Peru's internal armed conflict of the 1980s and '90s and its aftermath, which will interest scholars in many disciplines and regions. Paulo Drinot, coeditor ofComics and Memory in Latin America

Impressively documents the military's diverse interventions in Peru's culturememoirs, 'truth' reports, films, novels, and memorialsand its numerous attempts to censor cultural productions that challenge its preferred narrative. Jo-Marie Burt, George

Cynthia E. Milton is the Canada Research Chair in Latin American History at the Universit? de Montr?al. She is the editor ofArt from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-telling in PostShining Path Peru. l#!