Introduction to Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina

Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The material, visual, narrative, and pedagogical interventions it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. Two theoretical principles structure the book’s approach to cultural recall: the first follows from an understanding of memory as a social construct that is always as much about the past as it is of the present; the second from the observation that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. These principles guide the study of iconic sites of memory in the city of Buenos Aires; photographic essays about the missing and the dictatorship’s legacies of violence; documentary films by children of the disappeared that challenge hegemonic representations of seventies’ militancy; a novel of exile that moves recollection across national boundaries; and a human rights education program focused on memory. Understanding recollection as a practice that lends coherence to disparate forces, energies, and affects, the book approaches these spatial, visual, and scripted registers as impassioned narratives that catalyze a new attentiveness within those they hail. It suggests, moreover, that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like these can help advance the cause of transitional justice and contribute to the development of new political subjectivities invested in the construction of less violent futures.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1146/thumbnail.jp

Secrets, Trauma, and the Memory Market (or the return of the repressed in recent Argentine post-dictatorship cultural production).

Since the end of the last Argentine Dictatorship (1976-1983), a number of feature-length films have engaged in the public debate over the legacies of state terrorism. El secreto de sus ojos (2009), Argentina\u27s most recent Oscar winner, is the latest to do so, exploring the effects of more than a decade of impunity on those who lost their loved ones. Suggesting that restoration of a justice system that works can lead to the restoration of full civic engagement in a healthy body politic, the film raises important questions about citizenship and belonging in a post-national era. This essay explores the film\u27s phenomenal success in the global memory market to illuminate what remains at stake in contemporary narratives of reconciliation

Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

If, as Angel Rama claims in The Lettered City, the city dictates everything one must think, forcing its inhabitants to repeat its discourse, how might shifts in the city’s contours affect the construction of civil society? How might urban designs that facilitate the work of recollection help inform conceptions of citizenship for historical actors emerging from dictatorship? These are the questions cultural practitioners in Argentina address through interventions in the Buenos Aires cityscape that honor victims of state terrorism (1976–83). By analyzing three memorial sites that illuminate the complex relation between space and democratic practices, this essay traces how geography, architecture, trauma, and memory interface in the rearticulation of a collective Argentine national identity. (SRT

On Poet-Scholars: Un Taller de Poesia

In 2010 I piloted a Spanish-language poetry workshop for intermediate and advanced students at the College of William and Mary. I used the lines from Martin Espada\u27s poem for Chile as an epigraph for the syllabus: In the republic of poetry,/A train full of poets/Rolls south in the rain. Translating this for my students into Spanish, I sought to signal the kind of collaborative journey the course imagined: a semester spent together, a train full of poets, engaging poetic voices from the south through our own creative work. In so doing we would combine our skills in cultural criticism and translation with our capacity for invention, linguistic experimentation, and performance to yield an original body of work while deepening our understanding of Latin American poetic traditions, their contexts of creation and expression. Our common point of departure would derive from a simple question: why write? And we would develop our particular, situated responses to this prompt—why write poetry? why now? why here?—by considering how poets in Latin America and Latino poets in the United States have answered this question in the context of activism (militancia) and human rights. While similar questions could guide a traditional seminar dedicated to the critical study of poetry, by activating the vital creative force within my students I hoped to advance a different kind of learning—one structured through “practices that might not have so much to do with mastery and judgment as with affective connection and abductive participation.”[i] I was convinced, moreover, that the risk, self-discipline, collaboration, openness, and sensitivity this work requires could make it transformative. In coming to voice as part of this larger conversation, students would refine not only their linguistic competencies and affirm their ways of being in the world; they would do so by expanding their cross-cultural awareness, their understanding of the literary form, and their appreciation of the tools for change the public humanities can offer. The taller de poesía I now offer regularly as part of the Hispanic Studies curriculum builds on my experiences teaching Latin American literature and culture to non-native speakers in the US academy. But it also explores largely uncharted territory. A brief review of curricular offerings in departments of Spanish and Hispanic Cultural Studies suggests that creative writing classes taught in Spanish are few and far between. I am convinced this represents a missed opportunity to harness the awe-inspiring, revelatory, and critical capacities associated with second-language acquisition, including the joys of linguistic discovery, experimentation, and creation. With this in mind, I offer a template for one such course, including sample assignments and evaluation rubrics, while making the case for the ways of knowing the workshop environment facilitates. [i] Interview by Mary Zournazi with Brian Massumi in Hope: New Philosophies for Change (New York, Routledge: 2003), 220

The Republic of Poetry: Un Taller de Poesía

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