Cynthia Milton's edited volume brings together scholars from diverse fields to examine the role of artistic and cultural production in efforts to represent and make sense of Peru's recent armed conflict. Surveying a range of creative expressions, the volume calls for “an expansion of the archive” to include sources beyond written records and oral testimonies (p. 4). In shedding light on the agency of artists and artistic productions in postwar Peru, the book raises a number of important questions: What are the implications of using art as a mode of truth-telling in post-conflict societies? How do artistic representations, rarely seen as historical sources in their own right, capture experiences and affective worlds that are difficult to convey in nonfiction or through the written word? Readers are also invited to consider issues of proximity and distance in the making of representations, as the volume combines case studies from the Andean region of Ayacucho, where cultural producers' experiential claims of having “lived” the violence are often accompanied by desires to achieve national recognition, with those of Lima-based projects that call on Peruvians to recognize the uneven costs of war.

Milton's introductory chapter presents the book's conceptual concerns and situates the case studies, arguing that in Peru “cultural forms of (re)presenting are the present-day battleground for memory narratives” (p. 23). The editor's empirical chapter focuses on artwork produced in Ayacucho as part of local contests that took place during and after the time of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001–2003). Through careful analysis of hundreds of such works, Milton draws attention to artists' apparent preference for denouncing (rather than working through) past atrocities, depictions of continuing hardship in the post-conflict era, and the absence of reconciliation as a theme in the images. María Eugenia Ulfe's discussion of the history of the home altars called retablos as a regional art form in Ayacucho examines the complex ways in which retablo artists address issues of national importance, such as wartime abuses, through a medium that is often relegated to the domain of folk art. Víctor Vich analyzes the representation of limeño guilt and complicity in Alonso Cueto's La hora azul, observing that the novel's treatment of reconciliation reinforces hierarchical relations of race and class. Cynthia Garza's detailed account of the Lima-based theatre troupe Yuyachkani's Sin título, técnica mixta similarly emphasizes legacies of exclusion, with the play drawing connections between social factors contributing to Peru's defeat at the hands of Chile in the nineteenth-century War of the Pacific and the national context in which Shining Path emerged.

Several chapters are effective in demonstrating the way in which local cultural forms are shaped by, and respond to, national discourses. Ricardo Caro's case study of commemoration rituals in Sacsamarca describes how the community's narration of conflict appears to have shifted focus, from heroic martyrdom to positioning sacsamarquinos as “victims.” Jonathan Ritter's in-depth study of how a local genre of Carnival music (pumpin) emerged as a bearer of testimony and social commentary during the violence documents musicians' fears of repression, and also their use of idioms of “preserving and promoting” tradition to secure support for the musical style at a critical juncture (pp. 232–233).

Despite the chapters' shared emphasis on artistic and cultural production, the methodologies the authors use are far from uniform, with some contributors focusing more on the experiences and perspectives of artists themselves (for example, historian Ponciano del Pino's chapter-length interview with Ayacucho-based filmmaker Palito Ortega) and others devoting greater attention to the content of cultural texts. This plurality of approaches is one of the collection's strengths. Further, the volume's inclusion of translated excerpts from notable works that have used visual strategies to promote awareness of Peru's internal armed conflict (Edilberto Jiménez's ethnographic drawings from Chungui, Ayacucho, and the comic-book-style histories presented by Luis Rossell, Alfredo Villar, and Jesús Cossio) gives a sense of how the boundary between “commentator on” and “producer of” representations of the Peruvian armed conflict is less than absolute. Several of the book's Peruvian contributors, for instance, are academics who have been involved in the production of exhibits on the war and its legacy in recent years.

In sum, Milton's volume succeeds in providing a smart and timely analysis of the rich array of artistic expressions that participate in the making of Peru's post-conflict landscape.