Memory Studies

This introduction sketches out some spatial and locational aspects of memory and mourning in postdictatorial Latin America. The special issue aims to shed light on memorial sites’ role in the process of reclaiming individual and collective stories from victims of dictatorial repression. If, as Susana Draper has argued, during Latin America’s “return to democracy,” an “architectonics of transition” inscribed in urban spaces new diagrams of citizenship and exclusion predicated on the timeless present of consumption, memory’s “architectures of affect” commemorating victims of past state terror represent both an interruption and a challenge to neoliberalism’s postdictatorial city. Beyond the limits of the urban, rural landscape and the marking of diasporic locations of exile overseas also speak to the dispersive and uprooting effects of violence. The collection also asks for the frictions emerging between global forms of commemoration and local constellations of historical experience as manifest in particular sites.

The creation of museums, archives and other memorial sites since the start of the millennium has generated debates in Argentina over how and on whose behalf these spaces should be ‘recovered’, what their narratives should account for and who should be in charge of them. Less critical effort has been devoted to what comes next, namely, what happens once memories, in having been turned over to the public space, have become available ‘for everyone’. What conflicts are being unleashed by memory’s inscription in the public realm? This article analyses some of these in relation to the display of images of the disappeared, to exhibitions incorporating sensitive material and to the incorporation within archives and museums of minoritarian memories.

In contrast to other South American countries, in Brazil, where a military dictatorship (1964–1985) incarcerated, tortured and ‘disappeared’ countless opponents, there have been very few initiatives to construct a public memory in the form of memorials and museums. Only recently, when the National Truth Commission was set up in 2012, debates on the importance of memory re-emerged, including a significant increase in the number of proposals to construct memorials of national importance, taking as their point of reference the coup in which the military seized power 50 years ago. This text offers a study of news sections dealing with memories of the Brazilian dictatorship and the activities of the National Truth Commission as they were reported in the daily press between 2012 and 2014 as well as visits to some of the monuments and memorials erected or planned after the end of the dictatorship in various parts of the country. Cases studied are divided into two groups: first, monuments stemming from the transition to democracy and the political pact that underwrote it, and second, cases that reflect the fragility of this pact and the efforts to undertake a revision of its terms. Rather than one succeeding the other, these two versions of memory are interdependent and have contested the hegemony of public initiatives to shape our memory of the period.

In quite distinctive ways, protagonists of Argentine spaces of memory have addressed the complex questions of whether and how visitors experience empathy and empathic unsettlement in these spaces. I will draw from my recent experiences as co-professor with Marita Sturken of a group of US students in Buenos Aires. I will suggest that tension-ridden engagement between outsiders and insiders, including our exchanges with Argentine guides in three iconic sites of memory, can in some instances be conceived as empathic unsettlement. I will make use of performance studies to reflect on our “situatedness” within these spaces, in terms of “co-performance” and the outsider within. I hope to relate our dialogues and experiences to the possibilities for cross-border solidarities.

Engaging with debates about the future of the discipline of memory studies, this essay explores recent calls to pay attention to ‘transnational discourses’ of cultural memory, in this case how the diaspora space forged by the presence of Chilean exiles living in the United Kingdom has produced new mobile memory landscapes for remembering and commemorating the afterlife of the dictatorship (1973–1990) beyond the confines of the field of the ‘politics of memory’ in the Southern Cone. In particular, it discusses how the second-generation Chilean narratives presented here reflect both the locational and multisited formations of the diaspora space.creating multidirectional linkages with various histories of trauma that connectthe dictatorial past of the previous generation, with new transformative experiences of political activism.

This essay compares postdictatorial transformations of former spaces of confinement for political prisoners into shopping malls, such as the Buen Pastor prison in Córdoba (Argentina) and the Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo (Uruguay). It places these within the context of past and current debates on the human rights of “common prisoners,” as distinct from those of “political ones.” Yet precisely the omission of the political is mirrored at the prison-malls in the architectural erasure of territorial marks of repression (the cells) but also of all material traces of a poetics of freedom within the site, such as a window through which political prisoners had once successfully plotted a mass escape. These erasures can be read, I suggest, within a program of invisibilization of acts of freedom in the reconfiguration of memorial practices and places. Here, I want to ask, How are escapes being remembered/forgotten in current sites of memory, where the dominant imaginary neutralizes political content? Can we conceive of an “architecture of affect” that would relate to memories of escape?

The recent, spectacularly massive student marches in Chile have in some ways occluded Andean regional responses to extractive neoliberalism over the last 40 years. If we consider native subjectivity and the longer periodization of colonialism, then a different conceptualization and analysis of memory and subjugation emerge to complicate the field of memory and cultural studies. In this article, I analyze modern state violence through the “reducciones” period and post-1990 movement of “democratic transition” as two instances of acute racial capitalism and formulations of resistance by Mapuche peoples. Here, I wish to address what genealogy of cultural studies makes sense for understanding the long arc of colonial memory and paradigms of indigenous resistance. As such, my article tries to theoretically address possible future directions of memory studies in the Americas.

This essay introduces the work of Memoria Abierta (Open Memory), a non-governmental organisation that compiles, organises and distributes the mass of documentary evidence from human rights organisations and other personal and institutional archives connected to State terrorism in Argentina. It collates testimony on social and political life of the 1960s and 1970s and works on the territorial and spatial memory of the period of political violence in Argentina. Specifically, the ‘Topography of Memory’ section collects, systematises and produces documentation about sites, buildings and spaces that were used as spaces of temporary detention and clandestine detention centres, as well as spaces of recognition and remembrance. The decision to include architecture among the disciplines contributing to the organisation’s memory work has opened up possibilities for visualising the spaces that form the backdrop to the victims’ experience, as well walking through them. I shall discuss spaces where crimes were committed, including clandestine detention centres in urban, semi-urban and rural areas. Architectonic memory involves territories where traumatic events happened, ones characterised by the systematic use of repressive practices.

How does Santiago, Chile, remember its dead, the victims of political violence of the 1970s and 1980s? The existence of dozens of memorials, monuments, and sites dedicated to the memory of victims of the dictatorship would seem to indicate a settled national cultural politics that recognizes the injustices and crimes committed by a terrorist State. The public, nongovernmental nature of the initiatives is, nonetheless, the first indication that we are dealing with an ambiguous political story. While the central government has supported these initiatives, they are mostly the result of efforts by social organizations and victims’ groups. The spatial-temporal reading of the scenario of commemorative markers proposed in this article offers evidence of a geography of memory that is configured, on one hand, by a memory project that has inherited political trajectories which have been passed down for a long time, articulated by small groups that at certain junctures manage to form into producers of local memory. On the other hand, the high socio-economic segregation in residential areas shapes politics of memory that are territorially discontinuous and that encourage forgetting in residential settings of the country’s elite.