History, trauma and remembering in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011)

In 1994, the genocide in Rwanda claimed at least 800,000 lives in just 100 days. More than 20 years on, the memory and trauma of the atrocities still permeate the Rwandan society. This article explores how some of these different manifestations of trauma (individual and collective, actual and inherited, real and imagined, that of survivors and perpetrators), and especially their relationship to the genocide as a historical event, shape the internationally recognized Rwandan feature film, Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011). Drawing on the scholarship on trauma, the article examines Grey Matter’s uniqueness within feature films on the topic and its ambition to tackle the impossibility of memory and objectivity vis-à-vis varied experiences of the genocide. It traces the connection between trauma and Grey Matter’s structure, which refuses to offer events a firm chronological placement, both within and beyond the narrative

Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina

La televisión representa el pasado reciente de la Argentina a través de vínculos específicos con la memoria social: como un “emprendedor de la memoria” definiendo las agendas públicas, como un vehículo de transmisión intergeneracional sobre el pasado y como un creador de significados por medio de imágenes, sonidos y palabras, esto es, un “escenario para la memoria”. Un análisis de los vínculos entre televisión y memorias, construido alrededor de la desaparición forzada de personas durante la dictadura militar de 1976 a 1983, revela la manera compleja en la cual los obstáculos para relatar ese periodo trágico se combinan con el intento de vender un producto y entretener al espectador.Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory”. An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator.Fil: Feld, Claudia Viviana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales. Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales; Argentin

Language in Flight: Memorial, Narrative and History in David Copperfield

This article addresses David Copperfield to try and understand what it means to write the autobiography of a violently traumatic life story. The traditional interpretation of the novel is to read it as representing, and overcoming, a childhood trauma through the linguistic mastery of the adult. Yet if the novel thus dramatizes how traumatic origins can be represented in writing, it also asks what it means for autobiographical language to originate in a trauma. In this sense the novel is not only about the orphan who becomes an autobiographer, but about the emergence of a literary language when the self can no longer tell its own story. What would it mean to read the novel as both the story of an orphan and as a literary, and traumatic, orphaned story?Ce travail s’intéresse à David Copperfield sous deux aspects. Tout d’abord, comme un roman qui montrerait le dépassement d’un trauma de l’enfance dans une langue maîtrisée qui est celle de l’adulte. Par ailleurs, si l’on peut comprendre ce roman comme la mise en scène de l’écriture d’un traumatisme originel, le texte interroge aussi le langage autobiographique qui est né d’un trauma. Il ne s’agirait donc pas seulement d’un roman sur un orphelin devenu son propre biographe, mais de l’émergence d’un langage littéraire qui naîtrait de l’incapacité de l’individu à raconter sa propre histoire. Le livre pourrait-il donc se lire à la fois comme l’histoire d’un orphelin et comme une histoire orpheline et traumatique