Professor Helaine Silverman.
Professor Helaine Silverman.

Her research interests extend to historic urban environments, cultural heritage management and policy, critical museum studies, tourism, memory, identity, appropriations of the past, and spatial theory. Most of her research on these topics is conducted in Peru and she also has current projects in England and U.S. She is the editor of numerous books in Heritage Studies, including Heritage in Action (Springer 2016), Encounters With Popular Pasts. Heritage and Popular Culture (Springer 2015), Cultural Heritage Politics in China (Springer 2013), Contested Cultural Heritage (Springer 2011), and Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (Springer 2007).

Abstract

"Affiliative Reterritorialization: Monument, Heritage and the Japanese Colony in Peru"

Affiliative reterritorialization is a strategic engagement with, embrace of and connection drawn by immigrants to the host country’s national identity and character such that the new group can profess itself to be part of the nation while still maintaining its cultural identity. Affiliative reterritorialization was eagerly sought one hundred years ago in Peru by one of its immigrant communities – the colonia japonesa or Japanese colony – which had to negotiate language, customs, economy, and physical and ideological space in its host nation. The diasporic position of anxiety felt by the Japanese colony prompted their gift to Peru of a great monument portraying the mythic founder of the Inca Empire, erected as part of the centenary celebration of Peru’s independence from Spain. Since its creation the Inca monument has involved contested claims for legitimacy, power, meaning, place and space in the capital city of Lima and, by extension, the nation. The process continues through the present day.