Hartford, Conn., July 2 – Trinity College professor Anne Lambright has won a grant from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to study how years of sustained terrorism have affected the culture of Peru. Lambright, an associate professor of Modern Languages and Literature, is one of five scholars to receive a 2007 Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship, intended for recently tenured professors in the humanities at liberal arts colleges.
Lambright, who specializes in Latin American literature and culture, will use her award to produce a book-length study on how Peruvian literature, film and theater have dealt with rebel and state terrorism. From 1980 to 1992, a Maoist guerrilla organization known as Shining Path waged a campaign of prolonged brutality in Peru, targeting peasants, wealthy merchants and elected officials, as well as the general population. Between its militant activities and the state’s extreme military response, more than 69,000 were slaughtered or simply disappeared. Lambright’s project will focus on how this extended period of violence has been reflected in all major facets of that nation’s artistic output.
“Using literature, film, theater and key Internet sites that deal with the era of Shining Path and its aftermath, I propose to examine some fundamental questions of our times,” she says. For example, “What is the culture of terror – that is, not just the culture that produces terror, but the culture that arises in its wake? How does a society use cultural artifacts as archives of memory and means of collectively processing traumatic events?” Then there are the ways in which such rabid aggression can reshape cultural identity. “How do violence and terror change a national culture and a country’s understanding of itself?”
One phenomenon she has noticed is a fairly recent series of Peruvian novels and plays about Shining Path that feature dead people as characters, or corpses as central images. Lambright views this as a cultural response to 10 years of virtual silence on the part of Peru’s government about the horrors of the period, during which tens of thousands died.
“It’s as if art were trying to give these forever-silenced individuals a chance to tell their stories – the only form of justice they will ever see – by allowing the dead to speak through literature and theater,” she says.
Although her efforts will focus primarily on Peru, she hopes to draw parallels between its cultural experience and the response to terrorism in other countries, including our own. “I’m intrigued by the significant increase in graphic images of dead bodies on U.S. television shows such as CSI, Bones, NCIS, etc. since 9/11,” she notes, “which is again accompanied by an official masking of the tremendous loss of lives in the wars overseas. After all, we don’t see the dead bodies coming home from Iraq.”
McIntosh Fellowships, named for a late president of Barnard College, are geared for “especially promising” newly tenured professors who have family or other obligations that prevent them from accepting major fellowships that require them to travel extensively. Lambright, a mother of five, plans to make two trips to Peru during her two-year fellowship, in order to conduct interviews with writers, filmmakers, and performing artists. She also will visit research libraries throughout the U.S. “But a lot of my time will be devoted to holing up at home,” she says, “reading, thinking, and writing.”
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