Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (2024)

The Haunted Nomos: Activist-Artists and the (Im)possible Politics of Memory in Transitional Argentina

The article considers the role that contemporary visual art and activist-artists have played in transitional Argentina, beginning from the premise that they might be understood as involved in the staging of a wide-ranging shift implied by the term transition. We have chosen three points of entry into this exploration, discussed in three sections: first, the debates around the future of the building Escuela de Mechanica de la Armada (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, which was used as a clandestine detention and extermination center during the dictatorship (1976–83); secondly, the memorial project that is El Parque de la Memoria, which is still under construction in Buenos Aires; and, thirdly, the reexhibition of visual artworks from the period of the dictatorship brought together as the group show Cuerpo y Materia (2006), curated by María Teresa Constantin as part of the public marking of the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup. Drawing on the sociolegal perspective of Robert Cover, we consider these sites as engaging questions of memory, temporality, and membership that are both normative and, potentially, worldmaking in his sense. It is argued that the aesthetic, as a register that does not (wish to) articulate its demands on law in the latter’s terms, nevertheless critiques and calls on law insofar as these sites (re)mark the present against (im)possible Justice. In the relations between the absent bodies of the disappeared, the desires of the “social” body and the abstract regulative body of the law, it is the “liveliness” of the haunted nomos that kindles hope that in conjuring with ghosts, people will continue to contest, to propose, and to reconsider their commitments in the pursuit of Justice.

(Re) thinking the Past through Performance: The (Re) construction of Militant Childhood Imaginaries in the Post-Dictatorship of Argentina’s Cultural Production from 2003-2015

2018

Sins of the Father(land): Redefining Postmemory in Contemporary Argentine Literature

In the aftermath of state terror, memory has emerged as a significant and perhaps contentious topic. The particular type of memory considered in this article is that of the children of those who suffered state repression. The wider impact of events and how these are remembered is a growing area of memory studies and has seen the implementation of terms such as multidirectional memory, absent memory, prosthetic memory and postmemory, the latter being the one most often applied to children of the post-generation. This article explores the literary legacy of the repression in Argentina during the dictatorship period of 1976 to 1983 (known as ‘El Proceso’), as demonstrated in the literature of the post-generation. Using Félix Bruzzone’s 2008 novel Los topos as its primary example, it will consider questions of second-generation memory and identity and explore the definition of postmemory, its suitability and applicability to the Argentine situation and the literary manifestation of this type of memory. This article demonstrates how works of contemporary Argentine testimonial literature not only redefine the concept of witness but also of memory and in particular, postmemory.

Betraying Heritage: A Reading of the 1970s in Argentina through Visual Arts and the Gaze of the children of the Disappeared (MPhil Thesis, Cambridge, 2007)

Toying with History: Playful Memory in Albertina Carri's Los rubios

2013

Layers of Memory and the Discourse of Human Rights: Artistic and Testimonial Practices in Latin America and Iberia Hispanic Issues On Line (2014) 6 Memory, Postmemory, Prosthetic Memory: Reflections on the Holocaust and the Dirty War in Argentine Narrative

Their lives after: Theatre as testimony and the so-called ‘second generation’ in post-dictatorship Argentina

Journal of Romance Studies. Revisiting postmemory: The intergenerational transmission of trauma in post-dictatorship Latin American culture, 2013

In this article, I will examine the play Mi vida después [My Life After], in which six professional actors present and re-enact the stories of their parents' experiences of state terror in Argentina, as well as their own relationship with that past. In other analyses of this production, authors have turned to Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory in order to examine the generational dimensions of trauma and its remembrance. I will argue against this approach to understanding the experience of the so-called 'second generation' in Argentina in general and the 'hijos de desaparecidos' [children of disappeared] in particular. Instead, this article aims to show how Mi vida después highlights the need to search for new categories that can account for what this group of former child victims has lived firsthand. In addition, I will suggest that this play could be understood as a collective performance of testimony that relates not to the atrocities committed in the recent past as such, but to how those who were children at the time, whether or not they were physically affected by state violence, deal with the legacy today.

Memory and the spectator in post-dictatorship Argentina: misreading D'Angiolillo's Potestad

Studies in Hispanic Cinema, 2005

This article draws out the implications of Luis César D'Angiolillo's Potestad (Argentina, 2002) for contemporary debates on post-dictatorship memory in Argentina, as well as for current theories of spectatorship in film. Potestad forms part of a revisionist agenda that calls for a greater heterogeneity in post-dictatorship memory and seeks to reposition the violent repression of the most recent military regime within the broader context of the ideological conflicts of the 1970s. While the film initially appears to call for a psychoanalytical interpretation of its events and characters, it ultimately insists on a political reading; moreover, my analysis suggests that it effectively points to the insufficiency of psychoanalytical models of spectatorship to explain how meaning is constructed in film.

The archival riot: Travesti/Trans* audiovisual memory politics in twenty-first-century Argentina

Memory Studies, 2022

This article analyzes the making of travesti/trans* memory politics in Argentina. Focused on audiovisual initiatives, archives, catalogs, novels, and digital activism, it studies how these policies emerged in the wider context of the archival and digital turn. While placing the dialogues with Argentine centrality of memory in social conflict and Latin American archival grassroots politics, this text addresses the role of remembrance in the production of travesti/trans* identity. This article argues that trans* memory initiatives acted as politics of belonging that worked in two levels: defining the limits of a common identitarian past, and reaching a wider cisgender audience to highlight the social violence that defined travesti/trans’ precarious lives. This article shows how by placing travesti/trans* memories in tension with national retelling of the past, they are building politics of belonging to legitimate their claims of social reparation to make new trans* futures possible.

Humour and the descendants of the disappeared: Countersigning bloodline affiliations in post-dictatorial Argentina

Journal of Romance Studies, 2013

While it has been argued that the concept of postmemory does not accurately fit the specific situation of a new generation of local survivors in post-dictatorial Argentina, I contend that a critical engagement with postmemorial ruminations can still be productive to an understanding of the affective transmission of trauma beyond those who have been directly touched by violence. To explore this, this article focuses on the power of humour – often overlooked by classical studies on postmemory – to produce alternative forms of remembrance, which can circulate beyond bloodline affiliations. First, I show how the dark sense of the comical that permeated HIJOS, the organization founded by the Children of the Disappeared during the late 1990s, worked for the descendants as a collective strategy to cope with loss when legal justice was exempt from the political arena. Secondly, I draw upon Los topos (2008), a queer and insurgent novella written by Félix Bruzzone, to explore how its dark and bitter style ‘countersigns’ (in Derrida’s terms) bloodline ties while suggesting a more fluid entanglement among kinship, loss and political heritage. Ultimately, I contend that humour has not only provided a creative means of political empowerment for those who have been persistently constructed into victimizing narratives. Rather, it has become the surface and medium of an experience of iteration, displacement and contagion across expanded audiences.