Journal ArticleDOI
Returning to the Site of Horror On the Reclaiming of Clandestine Concentration Camps in Argentina
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In the context of the recent handover of the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina's most notorious centre for the clandestine torture and assassination of leftist militants under the dictatorship of 1976-83, to the city of Buenos Aires, in order to create on the premises a "Space for Memory" as mentioned in this paper, debates on the proper commemoration of recent past have gained momentum.Abstract:
Further to the recent handover of the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s most notorious centre for the clandestine torture and assassination of leftist militants under the dictatorship of 1976–83, to the city of Buenos Aires, in order to create on the premises a ‘Space for Memory’, debates on the proper commemoration of the recent past have gained momentum. In the course of these, it has become clear that there is currently no consensus among the human rights organizations, let alone Argentine society at large, on how the former sites of state terrorism can be adequately ‘recovered’, or what the purpose and function of such a recovery might be. Rather than as a shortcoming, however, this impossibility of closure, and of the monumentalization of a social consensus about the past in museal forms, might be taken as an opportunity to problematize some of the politics and material poetics underpinning the contemporary ‘memorial museum’. The article therefore analyses the principal arguments and posi...read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
TL;DR: In a recent collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past.
Dissertation
A haunted transition : reckoning with ghosts in post-dictatorship Chilean film
Abstract: This thesis analyses documentary and fictional films in postdictatorship Chile that respond to, or invoke, the experience of haunting. The concept of haunting is often used to describe the legacies of violent conflict and state repression, however, in the Chilean context, it has rarely been submitted to critique or analysis. Drawing on the work of Avery Gordon (2008), Jacques Derrida (1994) and Berber Bevernage (2013), I read haunting as a “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977) that is both repressive and transformative. The films I analyse respond to and reckon with this structure of feeling, in the process creating new imaginaries of mourning, inheritance and justice. Haunting also serves as a theoretical lens through which to analyse the films that is distinct from the lenses of trauma, cultural memory and transitional justice. The concept of haunting makes a distinctive contribution to postdictatorship studies by illuminating the ways in which films depart from the dominant spatial and temporal imaginaries of the democratic transition, responding to the present past as a realm of enduring emancipatory possibility. While dominant formulations of transitional time are premised on overcoming the dark past, and ensuring that it does not return, the haunted temporalities of the films and theoretical texts I read problematise strict delineations between dictatorship and democracy and offer new ways of narrating the presence of the dead. I start by analysing representations of the Chilean presidential palace, an emblematic site at which narratives of past violence and Chilean exceptionalism intersect. Subsequently, I analyse films from the early transition (1990-2000) and the late transition (2000—), engaging with theories of empathic unsettlement (LaCapra 2001; Hite 2014) and the expanded field (Krauss 1979; Huyssen 2003; Andermann 2012a). I conclude in the Atacama Desert by reflecting on the representation of landscapes of haunting and disappearance in which traces from different histories of repression, resistance and social transformation are read alongside each other. These non-contemporaneous landscapes not only expose the long history of state repression in Chile, but point to truncated, unfinished and ongoing struggles around which emergent imaginaries of social transformation might be built.
Journal ArticleDOI
Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador
Journal ArticleDOI
Geography and Biopolitics
TL;DR: In this paper, the second part of a two-part exploration of the question of biopolitics and its importance to social geography is presented, with particular reference to an area that has received little attention thus far.
Journal ArticleDOI
Penal tourism and a tale of four cities: Reflecting on the museum effect in London, Sydney, Melbourne, and Buenos Aires
TL;DR: The resurrection of former prisons as museums has attracted the attention of tourists along with scholars interested in studying penal tourism as discussed by the authors, and this work expands on previous research on prison museums, such as as discussed by the authors.
References
More filters
Book
Regarding the Pain of Others
TL;DR: Regarding the Pain of Others as mentioned in this paper is a searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror, from Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer.
Book
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
TL;DR: The Archive and the Repertoire as discussed by the authors explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity.
Book
Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
TL;DR: Hirsch explores the photographic conventions for constructing family relationships and discusses artistic strategies for challenging those constructions as mentioned in this paper, highlighting the gap between lived reality and a perceived ideal to witness contradictions that shape visual representations.
Book
Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
TL;DR: In a recent collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory
TL;DR: The first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany as mentioned in this paper, which cuts me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.