Sustaining Dominant Narratives
Chapter One examines post-2003 novels by celebrated authors Alonso Cueto, Santiago Roncagliolo, and Ivan Thays. These texts present a lens through which to read the CVR’s Final Report, by teasing out and focusing on its central themes and revealing how a certain sector, namely upper-middle-class, limeño, male intellectuals, process the civil war and its consequences. The novels elucidate postconflict efforts to redefine concepts of sovereignty and citizenship, while reifying dominant understandings of class, race, and ethnicity within national discourse. Even as they construct stories set in the post-war period, with protagonists who must intimately struggle with the vestiges of violence, these novels further a sustained project of symbolic violence that began with the Conquest and that engendered and sustained the war itself.