Disarming the Subject: Remembering War and Imagining Citizenship in Peru

War and its aftermath serve as powerful motivators for the elaboration and transmission of individual, communal, and national histories. These histories both reflect and constitute human experience as they contour social memory and produce their truth effects. These histories use the past in a creative manner, combining and recombining elements of that past in service to interests in the present. In this sense, the conscious appropriation of history involves both memory andforgetting—both being dynamic processes permeated with intentionality.

In this essay I explore the political use of the narratives being elaborated in rural villages in the department of Ayacucho regarding the internal war that convulsed Peru for some fifteen years. I suggest that each narrative has a political intent and assumes both an internal and external audience. Indeed, the deployment of war narratives has much to do with forging new relations of power, ethnicity, and gender that are integral to the contemporary politics of the region. These new relations impact the construction of democratic practices and the model of citizenship being elaborated in the current context.

Equally, these narratives serve as a central component in the elaboration of local and national identities, taking the heroic war epic as the structure that guides both the form and the content of these histories. This epic style emphasizes masculine heroism and has been canonized not only in these communities but in the academic literature as well. ¹ The "homogenizing" of these narratives has obscured alternative experiences and understandings of the war, compacting polyphonic memories into the dominant war story paradigm (Cooke 1996). This masculine version of the war—of ronderos defending their villages, defeating Sendero Luminoso (SL), and establishing new democratic practices and demands for citizenship—obscures the disjunctive and contradictory construction of citizenship in these villages. ² I argue that these disjunctions reflect the axes of differentiation that operate within these villages—axes that include gender, generation, and ethnicity.

If the war has permitted subaltern sectors of the rural population to seize the national stage in a slow and intermittent construction of citizenship, then armed participation against SL and the relationship the rondas campesinas formed with the armed forces have reinforced patriarchal relations within these villages, resulting in an unequal exercise of rights and sense of belonging to that imagined community called the nation. National integration achieved via participation in an armed conflict influences the political culture that follows, contributing to what Caldeira and Holston call "disjunctive democracy." As they explain:

By calling democracy disjunctive, we want to emphasize that it comprises processes in the institutionalization, practice, and meaning of citizenship that are never uniform or homogeneous. Rather, they are normally uneven, unbalanced, irregular, heterogeneous, arrhythmic, and indeed contradictory. The concept of disjunctive democracy stresses, therefore, that at any one moment citizenship may expand in one area of rights as it contracts in another. The concept also means that democracy's distribution and depth among a population of citizens in a given political space are uneven. (1996, 717)

The idea that the distribution of democracy varies according to the axes of differentiation that riddle any given political space—be it the nation or a campesino community—explodes the notion that one can speak of the "subaltern" or the "popular" as a monolithic group whose interests flow "naturally" from members' marginalized positions. Any binary logic that constructs a rigid dichotomy between "the official" and "the popular" obscures both the fluidity within such a dichotomy and the fragmentation that exists on each side of the great divide, falling into what Spivak calls "the ferocious apartheid of binary oppositions."

Binary oppositions can be ferocious, but metanarratives also bare their teeth in establishing the terms of engagement. This same binary logic manifests in many texts on political repression, postwar processes, and memory. There is a repetitive analytic structure that informs academic as well as activist production regarding these themes. On one side of the dichotomy is the category "official memory." This category...