Cultural Dyslexia and the Politics of Cross-cultural Excursion in Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa
Claudia Llosa's controversial Madeinusa (2006) has inspired unprecedented debate in the Peruvian media and blogosphere. Despite being the most awarded film in the history of Peruvian cinematography, it was disparaged by local left-leaning critics and intelligentsia, who accused Llosa of perpetuating racist colonial stereotypes of primitive and perverted natives. This essay examines the highly politicized debate surrounding Madeinusa and re(views) the film within a postcolonial feminist framework. In this reading the murderous impulse of the young indigenous protagonist is seen not as a sign of an evil and abject native but as a radical act of self-realization.
Memory, Trauma, and Phantasmagoria in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada
The film La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009) was inspired by the text titled Entre prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú by the medical anthropologist Kimberly Theidon. In this study, Theidon compiles the testimonies of a group of indigenous women who were sexually assaulted by members of revolutionary groups and the Peruvian army during a period of intense political and economic turmoil in the country. Llosa reinterprets the essence of the testimonies and the imprint of trauma in the film without depicting explicit violence, but rather through a highly poetic narrative and aesthetics. This study highlights the significance of breast milk in the film, the fear that invades the protagonist’s body, and the use of singing as a catalyst of oppression. Walter Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria” is the central theoretical concept used to examine physical patterns associated with the distress hidden in the individual and collective unconscious. The potato plant, the arid landscape, and the old aristocracy relics that carry high metaphorical signification are discussed using this theoretical framework, while also emphasizing the effectiveness of Llosa’s visual subtleness in depicting the essence of trauma as a shocking consequence of violence against civilians in a state of war.
Between identity and difference: Three ways of reading Nishida's non-dualism
The philosophy of Nishida KitarŌ offers the reader today not only a paradigm for a comparative philosophy, but also a methodological framework to construct a Buddhist philosophy. The key and, at the same time, the obstacle to his philosophy is the concept of the "self-identity of the absolute contradiction." This conceptual cornerstone of Nishida's philosophy is as controversial among scholars today as it is central to his philosophy. Critics, such as Tanabe Hajime and Takahashi Satomi, argue that Nishida's philosophy privileges the principle of identity over that of difference and falls into a monism; his supporters, most of all Nishitani Keiji and Ueda Shizuteru, to the contrary, claim that it comprises the key to philosophical non-dualism. In general, I am convinced that even his "self-identity of the absolute contradiction," if it is read carefully within the context of Nishida's philosophy, will render a paradigm that falls neither into a logical contradiction nor into a monism but that provides the foundation for a non-dualist philosophy. To this end, I will reread it first in the context of Nishida's overall project and, then, on the background of Nishida's debates with his critics.