Book Launch
Crossing the Current: Aftermaths of War Along the Huallaga River by Richard Kernaghan
March 1, 2023 | 3:00 – 4:30 pm ET
Smathers Rm 100
In contemporary accounts of the Shining Path insurgency and Peru’s internal war, the Upper Huallaga Valley has largely been overlooked—despite its former place as the country’s main cocaine-producing region. From afar, the Upper Huallaga became a political and legal no man’s land. Up close, vibrant networks of connection endured despite strict controls on human habitation and movement. In his latest book, Crossing the Current (Stanford University Press, 2022), Professor Richard Kernaghan asks what happens to the lay of landscapes once a prolonged period of political and social turbulence has ostensibly passed.
How have ordinary encounters with land, territory and law, and with the river that runs through them all, been altered in the aftermaths of war? And what might paying careful attention to those encounters reveal about new orientations of political time, grasped as a shifting, ever fleeting alliance between sky and earth?
Gathering stories and images to render the experiences of transportation workers, who have ferried passengers and things across and along the river for decades, Kernaghan elaborates a notion of legal topographies in order to understand how landscape interventions shape routes, craft territories, and muddle temporalities.
Drawing on personal narratives and everyday practices of transit, this ethnography conveys how prior times of violence have silently accrued: in bridges and roads demolished, then rebuilt; in makeshift moorings that facilitate both licit and illegal trades; and above all through the river, a liquid barrier and current with unstable banks, whose intricate mesh of tributaries partitions terrains now laden with material traces and political effects of a recent yet far from finished past.
If law cannot be separated from strivings for territory, Crossing the Current explores how legal relations interweave with the material, topographic specificity of places themselves. The chapters in this book, thus, privilege the sensuous reliefs of terrains, together with the transitory, historical forces that would animate them. Each chapter contends, in its own distinctive manner, that grasping those features and forces demands working with multiple kinds of images, so as to better disclose the relational nexus that arises between patterns of movement, prohibitions and infrastructurally-altered settings.
Visit the companion website for more images and information on this important new book.