Abstract
In the aftermath of state violence, how do we define the community of the affected? And how does this definition then shape not only our understanding of what has happened, but also the forms of truth, justice and accountability that might be possible? These questions are at the heart of this volume of essays on post-dictatorship memory in the Southern Cone of Latin America. The scholars here address these questions in the contemporary context of the region – with its ongoing legal, political and spatial changes and the strong legacies of human rights-based memory movements.
Drawing from work presented at the 45th Annual Conference of the Society for Latin American Studies, this collection takes an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary memory studies. Contributors are from psychology, sociology, politics, international relations and Spanish studies, and include emerging and senior scholars, as well as practitioners. This diversity brings complexity to the ways in which the book explores its overarching themes, with some articles grounded in ethnographic research (interviews, participant observation, etc.) and others offering textual or historical analysis.
Throughout the book, two major thrusts are evident. The first, notable in chapters by Cecilia Sosa, Alejandra Serpente and Gabriela Fried Amilivia, is a re-evaluation of the concepts of ‘the directly affected’, relatedness, and memory transmission in memory studies discourse, along with the implications of these for accountability and justice. The second, evident in chapters by Elizabeth Lira, Valentina Salvi, and Michael Lazzara, and Vikki Bell’s concluding remarks, is a concern with re-engaging the broader politics of social justice as it intersects with memory politics, including addressing the left-wing political struggles that some of the persons detained, killed, tortured or disappeared in the region participated in.
The volume particularly stands out for the ways in which it questions issues of bloodlines and family. In her ‘queer reading’ of the aftermath of Argentina’s 1976–83 military dictatorship, for example, Sosa ‘[contests] the biological framework’ (p. 64) in which the categories of the victims and the affected are frequently defined, urging that the stakes of defining ‘the grievers’ are political when, as she terms it, ‘grief has become a national matter’. Sosa argues that notions of ‘us’ can be redefined more inclusively through actions such as the Madres movements’ use of public space and aesthetic techniques in films such as Los Rubios. Similarly, Serpente argues for ‘broadening the limits of the familial’ (p. 133) by getting away from a focus on ‘direct victims and their relatives’ (p. 136). She interrogates the postmemory concept as it relates to the diasporic context of Chileans and Argentines in Britain, calling on the critique of Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of postmemory made by Susannah Radstone. Serpente interviews both political exiles and immigrants who moved during later periods of economic crisis to see what each of the group’s perspectives on the dictatorships might share, despite the different relationship the dictatorships have to their life histories. In another chapter, Amilivia’s work, though it looks at the private transmissions of memory between grandparents, parents and children in families directly affected by state violence (i.e. those with parents who experienced torture, imprisonment or disappearance), is ultimately interested in how these ‘everyday’ operations of familial memory may in fact be a process by which the memory of state terrorism in Uruguay endured despite long years of official silence. Her piece looks at the subterranean power of these private transmissions – a power that makes it possible for public discourse of memory to later erupt on a larger scale.
A disruption of the victim category is also implied in the chapter by Lira. After extensive historical analysis, she argues for the importance of including the broader political histories – e.g. the involvement with labor movements and working-class struggles of those who were killed, tortured, detained or disappeared – in Chile’s memory discourse, and urges going beyond private claims of victimhood to ‘[link] personal loss to political processes’ (p. 125). Salvi’s chapter turns to an examination of how human rights discourses of victimhood have been picked up by the political right in Argentina’s ‘Complete Memory’ movements in order to argue a kind of parallel suffering, thereby undermining critiques of state violence. Thus, she reveals the flexibility of discourses of victimhood that focus on individuals to potentially hobble state accountability processes. Lazzara also addresses how the shifting political and legal terrains of neoliberalized states shape the possibilities of justice. He looks at the limits of justice in the legal/trial context, and calls for an analysis of the Pinochet dictatorship period not as a state of exception, but as a period made possible by political and social forces (‘racism, classism, economic disparity, ideological entrenchment’ (p. 103)) that existed before the coup and, in other guises, continue into the present. An intriguing emphasis on the connections of the broader politics of social inequality to the public discourses of historical memory is evident throughout the book.
Missing from the volume, however, is an in-depth attempt to address contemporary memory in the region transnationally. Although transnational questions are raised briefly in Serpente’s and Lessa’s pieces, none of the essays directly examine transnational processes between the three countries or at the scale of international law. Given the orientation of the book, positioning itself specifically as a volume on memory of the Southern Cone region, this feels like a missed opportunity. Though state terrorism in each of the three countries took significantly different forms, a transnational analysis of the contemporary context could take on important questions for Latin American memory studies, such as: has a regionally specific form of memory developed in the Southern Cone (where a Uruguayan citizen might have been detained and disappeared via the police in Buenos Aires or Santiago under the Operation Condor program or the bodies of Argentinians dropped into the River Plate in the ‘death flights’ were sometimes found washed up on the Uruguayan shore)? And, regarding all three states’ relationships to international scales, are there any important similarities in how the actions of international bodies such as the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights are affecting them? And how might knowledge of the differences in changing political and legal approaches in each of these states – for example, questions of the applicability of international law to national laws granting amnesty or the feasibility of prosecutions for different genres of crimes – impact memory debates on the local scale? Though Crenzel’s introduction deftly presents an overview of both the junctures and differences in the histories of the three countries’ experiences of state repression, and Vikki Bell, in the concluding chapter, pulls out several threads of connection in contemporary memory debates, there is not a significant amount of space dedicated to a transnational view of the current memory politics of the region. As a reader, one wishes for another essay in the book that might address some of these questions and add another scale of analysis to the already excellent scholarship here.
Still, the book makes an important contribution to contemporary memory studies. A wide array of scholars will find the research here useful, even those not working directly in the area of Latin American studies. Scholars whose research deals with questions of memory transmission and family will find particular interest in this book, as will those whose work addresses definitions of ‘victim’ or ‘the affected’, language in memory movement discourses, or the crucial question of how memory movements dealing with past state crimes might provoke engagements with social inequality in the present. Where Latin Americanists will welcome new insights into the Southern Cone experience, other scholars will find important points of inquiry relevant across memory studies research areas. This volume has much to offer, addressing the contemporary moment in Southern Cone memory, with its shifting terrains of law, politics and public discourse, while asking us, as readers, to rethink the possible frameworks of accountability.