Extractive Care, Economic Violence, and Horizons of Grievability in Canción sin nombre (2019)

Abstract: The present essay considers Peruvian filmmaker Melina León's Canción sin nom bre (2019), which traces the story of an Indigenous migrant woman whose infant is stolen at a maternity clinic. While the film takes place in 1988 and makes frequent, explicit references to Peru's Internal Armed Conflict (~1980–2000)—thus designating it a Conflict film —Peru's civil war is overshadowed by the racialized economic violence and extractive care suffered by the protagonist. This essay considers the friction produced by the film's discrepancies in plot and framing, arguing that it suggests new interpretive frameworks for conceptualizing Peru's Internal Armed Conflict. Concretely, it proposes that the film presents economic violence as violence , forcing a retheorization of the Conflict's past and current consequences for migrant, racialized, and otherwise marginalized populations, with a particular emphasis on the impact of (neo)liberal economic models. Finally, and using Judith Butler's notion of grievability as a point of departure, it argues that the film presents a model for making non-physical, economic violences grievable violences and for expanding what I call Peru's horizons of grievability to include the lives and experiences of those who, according to capitalist logics, do not matter.