David Nugent

Corruption Now and Then: Managing Threats to the Nation in Twentieth-Century Peru

In this paper, I draw on Peruvian government responses circa 1950 to the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, an underground political party, to identify the features of a distinctive, mid-twentieth-century corruption/anti-corruption complex. I also show how this earlier complex differs from its contemporary counterpart. In the neoliberal present, concerns with corruption emerge in a context in which the public domain finds itself at risk from an alarming expansion of private appropriating powers. National governments play a key role in reconfiguring the public/private divide, and thus they are directly implicated in corrupt activities. Around 1950, however, it was just the opposite: the private domain was regarded as being under dire threat from an emergent global public. Furthermore, national governments were at the forefront of efforts to prevent the spread of the corrupt globalizing forces that were said to be gathering at the nation’s borders. To draw out the distinctiveness of the mid-century corruption/anti-corruption complex, I focus on the distinctive shadow worlds imagined into being around 1950 as government officials sought to protect the nation from corruption. I also explore the peculiar state optic that emerged at mid-century, which mediated government efforts to see the shadow worlds that officials regarded as such a profound danger.

A Conversation with Joan Vincent

JV: Yes. I was raised in England, but my father’s family came from Alsace[-Lorraine], which is between Germany and France. And therefore the question of identities has always been very critical for me. My father was an antiquarian, and when I was a child he would take me out in the car when he had long trips to Big Houses to look at their furniture, talking about the history buried in the landscape. I was born in 1928 and grew up during the depression and the war. My father worked for the Free French, and my mother was a firefighter and air-raid warden. I remember shrapnel coming through the front door and my father picking it up, not realizing it would be hot. After the war only the vets got places in university, so instead I went to teacher training college and then taught secondary school.