The Great Heist

Dictators, helicopters, and rebellious peasant stories.

"Every mountain has a story here," Valerio tells me.

He smiles and a silver tooth glistens in the afternoon sunlight. Valerio is a van driver that lives in the Lares valley, but now he's also a friend. He supports his family by driving passengers up through the Abra de Lares, a high mountain pass, and down into the small town of Calca that serves as an outlet to access the rest of the Cusco region. On one of these trips, we are driving through a breathtaking altiplano valley. Clouds crown the snow-capped mountains that rise on either side of the road.

He points to the most prominent peak in the area. In its shadow, alpacas graze the yellow grass. "For example," he explains, "that's Qolquecruz. He's an Apu."

Apu refers to especially sacred mountains that are agential, and capable of controlling the weather and guarding over the flocks of the valley. I call upon my mediocre Quechua to discern the meaning.

"Silver-Cross Mountain?"

"That's right… Silver Cross. They say that the mountain's peak revealed a brilliant silver cross to the people of the valley."

"What happened to it?" I ask.

"You know Fujimori?"

"Yes, of course." I answered, thinking of the infamous ex-dictator.

"He stole it."

The embrace of neoliberal policy and increase in mineral extraction projects under the Fujimori government is remembered differently across Peru. This article views neoliberal governance from a series of Quechua communities in the high Andes to analyze how Peruvian state power is conceptualized at the margins of its realm. Campesino stories of state extraction schemes disrupt narratives of neatly ordered market-led progress, and instead emphasize elements of inexplicability, fragmentation, and disjointedness. Images of the state are shattered and then reconstructed in novel ways within memory narratives. The analysis of such narratives provides an opportunity to reconsider the nature of political memory in rural Peru.

At the center of capitalist development is a variety of forces and images that push and pull the imagination: the divine, the profane, historical trauma, and its living memory. Where liberal market ideology promises linear progression, those on the receiving end see only destruction and inexplicable acts of power that descend from the skies in deafening helicopters to take what was once theirs. In the Lares Valley, Quechua chroniclers draw on the natural, the supernatural, and the unthinkable to construct a certain conception of political history that does not produce a neat explanation of events, but instead points towards the inexplicability of liberal mechanics as viewed from the neo-colonized margins. In different regions, these stories vary, but they all address unanswered questions about the power and mystery of the distant state and its clandestine ability to exact violence and rob the countryside of resources and ancestral artifacts like a thief in the night. In the transmission of story, fact and fiction become indistinguishable. Where much anthropological attention is given to the idea of “ideology”, relatively little is given to the fact that people delineate their worlds, at multiple scales, in story-like creations and rarely in ideologies as customarily defined. (Taussig 1984, 494)

Put simply, my goal is to analyze the way in which narrative is attached to and informs ideas of liberal economy, as well as the unexpected and diverse ways that such narratives are interrupted. I begin by examining the historical politics of capitalist development in Peru, and the way that capitalist modernity relies on both material processes and an ideological, narrative infrastructure. The second part elaborates how local mountains, ruins, and the telling of their stories intersect with memories of the disastrous events of the 1990s under Fujimori.

In the final part, I argue that campesino stories interrupt meta-narratives of progress, and in so doing provide a crucial clue to how state power is imagined at the very margins of its realm. I especially put these stories in conversation with critical historian and theorist Walter Benjamin in order to understand how fragmented and deeply particular Andean stories might provide fresh insights in the age of neoliberal economy.

The State and the State of Things

The history of the rural campesino community and its relationship to the state is anything but straight forward. The 1960s and early 70s saw a brief period in which the campesino was thrust to the center of national politics during General Velasco Alvarado’s land reform. The reform, which defeated the feudal hacienda system, briefly treated the campesino community as not just a political protagonist, but as a sort of national hero (Cant 2021, 56-60). Campesinos of the Lares Valley remember the Land Reform period fondly; a sudden change of governance at the national level had introduced many new basic services and infrastructure. In even the most rural communities, kerosene lamps slowly turned into streetlights, and basic Quechua language education became attainable for the first time. Sometimes, the schools were even built by Peruvian soldiers themselves. (Cant 2021, 41) Briefly, there was even a universal basic income for some campesinos. “It wasn’t much” I’m told by one farmer, “but it’s more than we have now.”

General Velasco’s effort to defeat the hacienda system and its embedded political power wasn’t just an economic move, but a fundamentally ideological one. In 1969, Peru was one of the last Andean countries to reform colonial agricultural systems. Velasco was eager to push the Land Reform through, and imagined the departure from neo-feudalism towards well-organized state cooperatives to be the birthing process of a dignified and modern Peru. Despite his well-documented anti-communist attitudes (which would eventually generate tensions between his administration and new Marxist-syndicalist movements in Peru) he looked to the Soviet cooperatives as a potential model for a new rural system. In the national discourse, the Andean turned from indio, to debt-peon, and finally to campesino. Eric Wolf (1982) reminds us that all identities are co-produced at the intersection of local and large-scale historical processes. Here, the idea of the nation and its construction is inextricably linked to a progressive and unilinear narrative. Similarly, Said (1993) argues that the nation is inherently constituted by narratives. The progressive move from neo-feudal relations to social-democratic reform to economic growth through unleashed extractivism is historically framed by the state as a natural and coherent process. For Quechua speaking communities, as I detail later, it appears as non-coherence.

Modernity inherently relies on narrative; it also requires the construction of the past and the constant departure from it. Capitalist development holds as a given that although the future ahead is not quite known, its silhouette is apparent: it bears the shape of enlightenment rationality and liberation of the individual through the liberal market. The past being fled from is blurry, but it resembles the “traditional” and thus, “the primitive.” Such is the confidence of modern narratives of progress that modernity itself is imagined as the liberation of the self from a host of false fetishes (Keane, 2007) Yet, in the Lares Valley, in the margins, narrative itself falters. The assuredness of national power gives way to unpredictability and postmodern economy is a jigsaw puzzle of shocking and inexplicable interventions.

In the view of James Ferguson (1999), modernity sometimes lies in the past. For Peruvian campesinos, the 1980s summoned a sharp decline in access to social services, connection, and the general feeling of forward momentum. For only a short period, rural communities had been partially enfranchised into history, and its vehicle, the nation. With the rise of the Peruvian neoliberal right and the disastrous Internal Armed Conflict, the development of the countryside halted abruptly. In its place was a potent combination of rural monetization and the drive to create export-oriented markets.

The consequences of this new vision of Peru reached a fever pitch as Fujimori took power and doubled down on neoliberal development. Poverty worsened dramatically for the communities of the Lares Valley, already one of the poorest regions of the country. Malnutrition soon increased as control over food production was increasingly subjected to regional and national market forces. Once-stable networks of indigenous barter, or challakuy, became increasingly monetized and decreased as the chief means of acquiring food. Like Ferguson, Pratt (2022, 70) details how late liberal crises are capable of “reversing” characteristics that national discourses hold as central to modern life, including structured civil society, social programs, and confidence in government legitimacy. I rely on the recurring theme of neoliberalism’s “disjointed” characteristics. Disjointedness does not simply describe the historical departure from centralized Fordist manufacturing towards vertical disintegration (Harvey 2000) and the new possibilities of a single firm to exploit resource and labor markets in nearly any corner of the globe. Disjointedness also conjures the appearance of liberal economy as viewed by Quechua campesino story tellers, where liberal narratives of progress are not dominant, and national political actors are made into characters in alternative stories.

The Heist

Sometime after initially learning about Fujimori’s theft of the silver cross from the peak of Apu Qolquecruz, I found myself once again attempting to piece together the story. In the rural community of Ccachin, I sat with a local farmer and community leader, Vitor, in his corn field. Despite it being the peak of the Andean winter, the sun was intense. We shared a lunch of homemade flatbread and baked potato after spending the morning harvesting corn. The yield was not good this year, and he seemed concerned. Still, he agrees to answer my questions.

“Did Fujimori really steal it?” I ask Vitor, recalling the story that Valerio had told me about the silver cross and it’s from the mountaintop by Fujimori’s men. He nodded.

“On top, in the snow, there was a cross. It could be seen from other countries before it became hidden. They [Fujimori’s men] came in helicopters. They wanted to come and steal it, but they couldn't!”

The story paints a vivid picture in my mind: the clouds part, and the machines descend from above, sudden, and terrifying. The sounds of rotors are a deafening intervention on the once quiet pasturelands that lie under the shadow of Qolquecruz. The helicopters pull on the shining silver cross, but the mountain appears to pull it back, the invaluable object suspended for only a moment in thin air—until neither force gets what they want. The military helicopter spins out of control and crashes into the mountain. The enchanted artifact tumbles into the rocky crevice, disappearing from sight but burned into social memory, a memory which is destined to become a powerful claimant over the story of the mountain as a whole.

“They sometimes make mistakes. They are envious and want to steal from the mountains, steal the silver, steal the streams, and take out the plata [silver] to pay for their crimes.”

“Why did he do it?” I asked. “To export it for money?”

“That’s right.” Victor said resolutely. “And because he was an authoritarian. This is what we say out here in the fields. This is what the workers say.” He explained that Fujimori’s goal was to steal the resources, artifacts, and dignity from the campesinos.

We sat for a moment and finished our lunch.

“Right.” He finally said, standing and grabbing his sickle again. He had expended all the details he could, and besides, there were still several rows of corn to be harvested. The sun was beginning to dip low in the sky, turning the valley cool and blue. I gathered my sickle as well, and followed him down into the corn, hoping to earn a little more of the story.

            Some miles away, the tiny community of Maucau sits under the shadow of Qolquecruz. I am there visiting my friend Alfredo and doing interviews. It is a little after six in the morning, but the community members have been up working for hours. As I speak with Corleana, a mother and farmer from Maucau, the sun begins to emerge over the massive white mountain peak, and I’m reminded of the heist. I ask to hear the mountain’s history. She nods and begins the willay, the storytelling. The story is in Quechua, and Alfredo translates for me. Her tone is speculative, nearly hesitant, as if the memory will suddenly deceive her. The story goes like this:

Helicopters emerged from the skies twenty years ago to take the cross (helicupturowanmi hamuranku cruzta suwaypaq). The machines descended, and seized the cross with a mess of chains. In their haste to steal the artifact, one helicopter nearly crashed, but managed to stay skyborne. “Sh sh sh sh sh sh sh!” She imitates the sounds of the helicopters’ rotors. The helicopters survive, and in this version, successfully steal the cross. It was brilliant and beautiful, she tells me. Now, it’s gone. With a worried expression, she explains that people have less respect for Apu Qolquecruz now. Surely, the Apu will continue to live as a powerful being—no force of man can defeat him, Alfredo chimes in to tell me—but as for the well-being of the communities? They are not so sure. The theft of the cross signaled a point of no return, perhaps both politically and cosmologically. From their expressions, I detect that we are now in unknown territory.

Father Polentini’s Discovery

While chatting after a long day of travelling and community assemblies, my friend Anisetto tells a different version of the story. He’s skeptical of the theft of the cross, and tells me the story that is popular in his community. I came to realize that stories of Fujimori’s interventions often conflict and compete for discursive dominance in the countryside.

“That story is actually about Paititi—Incan ruins, in the jungle. Not the mountain.” He explains. He’s tired from the workday, and answers by raising his head briefly from the pillow he’s made from his arms crossed over the table. “During the Fujimori government, his men robbed and extracted all the silver and gold from the ruins to export it and make money.”

This story bore similarities to the one about the silver cross that Valerio and Victor had told me in the Lares valley, but I had never heard of this version until now. Everyone else at the dinner table apparently had. There are many versions, each one adding its own new details, fragmented and difficult to grab onto, as if thrown to the wind. The story they all point towards goes like this:

Father Juan Carlos Polentini Wester was an Argentinian priest working at a Parish in the Lares Valley of the Cusco region, some 45 miles away from the communities in which I stayed, further down in the Yanatile Valley, where the dry altiplano slowly turns into hot jungle highlands, and the corn fields become coffee and banana plantations. During an expedition in 1999, somewhere in the Madre de Dios rainforest, Father Polentini discovered the ruins of Paititi, the supposed final holdout of the last Inka, who had retreated to the jungle refuge after the fall of Cusco. Paititi had already captivated imagination in North and South America long before this—explorers, amateurs, and scientists had all participated in expeditions to discover the legendary city of gold since the early 20^th century. A couple of years had passed since his discovery, and the priest was getting older. His age began to limit the number of trips he could make to the site. In 2003, he made one final trip. What he saw under the dappled light of the rainforest canopy shocked him—the precious golden artifacts of the final Inka were gone. The inventory of riches that the Inka had carved into the stone now showed a comprehensive list of what had been stolen and would never return. According to Father Polentini, the most valuable among the artifacts was a cloak woven from gold. What’s worse, the complex had been destroyed with dynamite to hide the evidence. What happened to the riches? The artifacts? The golden cloak? Where did they go and why? Like all resources and mystical artifacts that disappear from the countryside, the answer is unknowable. Father Polentini’s report holds that they were all exported to Japan for profit. When I ask others, they shrug and say: “away”.

When I return to Lares and ask Aquelino, a respected elder, he tells this same story. “They stole from the living Inka”, Aquelino tells me in his version. He is referring to the Indigenous people of the Madre de Dios lowlands, where the ruins were reported to have been seen. After the sack of Cusco by the Spaniards in 1533, followed by the Incan army’s unsuccessful siege to regain the capitol, it is said that the Incan nobility escaped and fled to the Madre de Dios rainforest. There, the last vestiges of the Incan royalty lived out the remainder of their days surrounded by treasures of mythical proportions that they had rescued from destruction during the battle of Cusco. Among the campesinos I spoke with, the Quechua and Asháninka people now living there carry this legacy. To make sure I’ve understood, Aquelino says it again: “They stole from the living Inka.”

The story of Paititi has no shortage of critics online. A web search will reveal that it is relegated to the realm of conspiracy theory, or at best, personal testimony. Peruvian forums online often accuse Father Polentini of senility or opportunism. Yet, the story has remained durable over two decades, especially in the rural Andes. Its popularity among campesinos gives a clue about the nature of truth and its social contingency. The staying-power of Polentini’s story is not found in the verification of its facts, but in the kernel of truth it provides: for Fujimori, nothing is off limits. In his analysis of terror and social knowledge in the Putumayo region, Michael Taussig has said that “my subject is not the truth of being, but the social being of truth, not whether facts are real but what the politics of their interpretation and representation are.” (Taussig 1987 xiii) Moving from a fact-based towards a socially contingent conception of truth reveals how all truths are composed of overlapping and negotiated assertions of meaning, power, and representation.

Two decades after the Fujimori era, one can still detect a collective trauma in the campesino communities of the Lares Valley. Memories of his administration focus on various genres of crimes: misogynistic violence and forced sterilization of Indigenous women, military violence during the Internal Armed Conflict and the general infliction of poverty and resource extraction schemes on the people of the countryside. Significantly, Fujimori’s tenure is remembered differently in the urban centers than it is in the campesino countryside. The former regions remember Alberto Fujimori and his daughter, Keiko, as political actors in the strictest sense of the word. In urban thought, his administration’s lasting effect is the phenomenon of Fujimorismo, a strain of political thought that mirrors other right-wing movements, namely in its commitment to neoliberalism and conservative social policy. In campesino communities, his image takes on a life of its own: allusions to Fujimori serve as a synecdoche for the state as a whole, whose lasting importance does not even reference electoral politics. His image lives an “effervescent afterlife” (Jones 2017) in the circulation and maintenance of campesino memories. Through the stories that I have detailed here, his imagined personage exceeds the boundaries of “politics as usual” (De la Cadena 2010) and emerges as the chief demiurge of extraction and impoverishment. The sole face of an otherwise faceless power structure. As Tsing (2005) has explained, concepts from global and national discourses are never completely stable; they are always contested and made local wherever they touch the ground. In other words, the semiotics of national history are up for grabs, and are deeply contingent upon which political arrangements and modes of representation make them possible. As Carole McGranahan says, “the making of history is a social and political process, not a neutral rendering of what has happened in the past. To make history is to historicize, to socially and politically legitimate a particular happening or version of what happened as true.” (McGranahan 2010)

The (Im)possibility of Narrative

I spent some weeks pondering these stories, asking any willing community member to recite them for me. Continually, I came up against sudden dead ends and lack of context at the end of each version of the story. How was such a heist possible? When exactly did this happen? What information could provide the edges to this jigsaw puzzle? It seemed that the ending of each story about these heists was punctuated with a hesitant suggestion that someone in another community, perhaps closer to the mountain, would know more. After speaking with many storytellers, both in the Lares Valley and outside of it, I slowly came to realize that this lack of explanation was precisely the defining point. In the telling of stories of state theft, there is an interplay between the past and present, the real and the impossible, the knowable and the unknowable; the swirling together of these elements and the impossibility of conclusion invites speculation, mirroring the same mystery imparted by distant state politics and their unpredictable but always disastrous local effects.

Walter Benjamin has provided crucial tools to understanding the effect of the story, and the way in which it differs from mere information. In Benjamin’s view, information is exhausted in the moment in which it is new. Explanation must surrender itself immediately to interpretation without losing any time. (Benjamin 1963) The printed news was crucial in the transformation from oral storytelling to quickly digestible information. Stories, on the other hand, are durable. They contain affective and representational qualities that are able to increase in concentration and strength over time and through circulation. Benjamin seems to suggest that meaning (in this case, political meaning) is not contingent upon explanation (nor, I would add, dependent upon the ability of a story to be reflected in Western historical archives). Whereas “information” implies universality and immediacy, the stories that constitute social memory are defined by opposite characteristics: specificity and contingency. Similarly, Maurice Halbwachs (1992) views all history and memory as constituted by social frameworks of meaning, or as Carole McGranahan (2010) has added, constituted of them. This point is to be taken seriously if we wish to understand what tools the stories provide us beyond the recording and retelling of events.

In the Lares Valley, the story’s transmission from one chronicler to another causes the story to move through the valley and up the mountain pass and back again. When the story returns, it brings back new details with it, like a traveler returned from distant lands. Though the exact chain of events is chronicled differently in each community, the listener is always left with the image of machinery, calamity, theft, and forces of man that are destined to fail. As Aquelino suggested, Fujimori struck a blow against the final vestiges of the Inka that the Spanish could not have hoped to. If critics of neoliberal extraction have correctly understood its material effects, they may have missed its effects on the sacred and cosmological. In the same way that the state cannot be separated from political economy in Wolf’s (1982) view, neither of these concepts can be separated from their representations, perpetuation, or questioning through community imaginings.

Similar to my goal here, Benjamin was interested in the ability of the montage to juxtapose fragments of memory and imagery that would provoke a reaction against teleological narratives of history, which even the Marxists had adopted into their sweeping historical materialism. Benjamin sought a type of narrative tool that would compel critical historians and workers alike into embracing historical narrative as a site of struggle, and as a heaping plethora of events that could have been otherwise. For Benjamin, the functionalist assumption of history’s teleological progression was a sleight-of-hand, not unlike Haraway’s “god-trick” (Haraway 2013, 460). It is perhaps useful to imagine the montage as both a quasi-artistic form and as a tantalizing but still-unrealized promissory note for a new type of political analysis (Pensky 2004, 177) As scholar of Benjamin, Stanley Mitchell, explains:

Montage became for [Benjamin] the modem, constructive, active, unmelancholy form of allegory, namely the ability to connect dissimilars in such a way as to 'shock' people into new recognitions and understandings… Thus, Benjamin came to regard montage, i.e., the ability to capture the infinite, sudden or subterranean connections of dissimilars, as the major constitutive principle of the artistic imagination in the age of technology.  

(Mitchell, 1973, as quoted in Taussig 1987, 369)

This form of critical history is “unmelancholy” in its dialectical embrace of possibility. Shock was meant to provoke one into an understanding that each historical event leading to bourgeois domination contains not just terror, but through its infinite possibilities of otherwise-ness, it also contains flashes of utopia. The memory and its imagery are precisely this dialectic at a standstill. His reliance on the Marxist idea of the commodity form as simultaneously constituted by a fantastic detritus of exploited labor and as possessing a utopian, dream-like quality is mirrored in his approach to historical events. More saliently, it provides ethnographers an encouraging way to process subjugated stories and knowledges as tools against narratives that foreclose alternatives to the status quo. McGranahan (2010, 19) reminds us that memory has no preassigned genre or form. Where memory drives narratives, it also contains the very energies and interpretations with which history is “forged or forgotten”. To treat history and its retelling as a politically embedded contest within a matrix of social power leads one to also recognize that subaltern stories are representations of the otherwise, and constitute radical new possibilities.

I suggest that the montage form, in its ability to at once draw on the fragmented, metaphorical, and real, is also the most appropriate narrative form for late liberalism and its disjointed characteristics. The connection of dissimilars: Fujimori and his military men emerging to steal Indigenous artifacts, uniting the ancestral past with the unknown future. Shock: the inexplicability of state action, the arbitrariness of development, the impossibility of narrativizing it all. The act of combining and connecting disparate elements is the alchemical work that births historical memory, to which functionalist structure is only applied post facto. Quechua chroniclers seem to work against the teleological, self-assured assumption that liberal market projects are themselves the material manifestations of a rational march forward into the future. State-backed capitalist development emerges as violence upon the landscape, unpredictable and shocking. If the growing victories of fascist terror in Europe shook the Frankfurt school’s confidence in the usefulness—or perhaps very possibility—of singular historical narrative, then we may say the same of Indigenous experiences of late liberal unpredictability and exercises of state sovereignty. Similarly, Pratt points out that the process of decolonization necessarily views modernity from the world intellectual periphery. In so doing, capitalist modernity and extraction are held as objects of critical reflection, which gives rise to the post in postmodernity (Pratt 2022, 34). If postmodern inquiry questions the self-assuredness of “the Modern”, then it also must question its commitment to a specific narrative form.

Conclusion

Thus far, I have drawn on Quechua stories of extraction to understand how state power is viewed from its margins. The stories do not rely on the explanatory power of complete narrative resolution, but the opposite. Like Benjamin’s montage form, stories of intervention rely on shock and the connection of dissimilars, which range from the sacred to the material. The theft of Qolquecruz and Paititi are inherently tragic yet inexplicable—the storytelling lives through memory, and attempts to offer no explanation of the events. Explanation is impossible. Western positivist history relies on the opposite: the analysis wrought from concrete events and their connection to one another, fashioned into functionalist narrative only after the fact. Instead, the inherent “incompleteness” of these stories of extraction reveals the appropriate form of narrative in the age of postmodern economy at its margins. However, these stories qua criticisms are not allowed to go beyond the epistemological margins. Pratt says that “in the standard account of modernity, vernacular cultures have little place. If anything, they are perceived as forms of otherness (‘tradition’, for example).” (Pratt 2022, 54) In so doing, the periphery is maintained discursively, the enfranchisement of certain understandings of progress, and the disenfranchisement of their criticism.

Certain historical contents become buried under the essentialized and functionalist narrative of history—the narrative of the ruling class (Foucault, 2020). These contents are “subjugated knowledges”, and dismissed as inadequate or incomplete. The theft of Qolquecruz and the sack of Paititi would certainly qualify for this category. At once, these two stories reveal the rupture and messiness of neoliberal extraction, while calling on a more-than-human conception of history. In liberal “politics as usual”, (De la Cadena, 2010) the role of nature, the supernatural, and the fragmented has no place in the critique of political economy. It is an epistemological boundary that must not be crossed. The telling of history is a restricted zone of political control, whether consciously or not. This article has invited the exact opposite. New Quechua narratives, composed of varied fragments from pop culture politics, community memory, and more-than-human agency, arise as the postmodern analytical form par excellence, pointing out the surrealism of living on the frontier of flexible accumulation. Suddenly, grand narratives of historical progress and liberal modernization are made to appear as nothing more than the West’s own cosmology, and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” as its crude animism. If it is true that anthropology, as Levi-Strauss conceived it, should serve as the full development of the observed’s ways of knowing and being, (Hamberger 2004, 345), then we must allow contemporary Quechua stories to challenge the hunt for neatness and order through narrative and instead consider the use of disjointed montages as the narrative form for capturing the essence of late liberalism at its margins.

João Biehl (2023) has provoked anthropologists to embrace the possibility of subjugated experiences and subjectivities to interrupt hegemonic ways of knowing and ordering. In what ways might anthropology draw from the poetic—potentially radical—openings provided by the “literature of the unlettered” (Biehl, 2023)? As Viveiros de Castro (2009, 41-42) has argued, the first step would be to resist committing anthropology into a servile relationship with economics, sociology, or their metanarratives which only succeed in recontextualizing the world’s “existential practices” into the framework of the analyst. At the same time, anthropologists also cannot ignore the meta-narratives that do operate as powerful claimants on one’s understanding of their social world and its possibilities. The stories that I have told above hold the potential to grab onto sweeping narratives of national history without reifying them, but instead by holding them as objects of critical reflection. Such “subaltern literatures” (Biehl 2023) requires a new attentiveness to how economy, development, the nation, and their constituent narratives can be challenged through the appropriation of imagery and its alchemical reconfigurations within social memory.

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