New Approaches to Latin American Studies

Culture and Power

Juan Poblete

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138067967
• eBook ISBN: 9781351656344
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Academic and research fields are moved by fads, waves, revolutionaries, paradigm shifts, and turns. They all imply a certain degree of change that alters the conditions of a stable system, producing an imbalance that needs to be addressed by the field itself.

New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include:

• Why are turns so crucial?
• How did they alter the shape or direction of the field?
• What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute?
• What were or are their limitations?
• What did they displace or prevent us from considering?

Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.

1

The Memory Turn

Michael J. Lazzara

More than four decades after repressive military dictatorships and bloody civil conflicts swept across Latin America, memory has become a battleground and a battle cry, a concept around which activists and academics have sought to denounce human-rights violations and articulate the challenges of consolidating democracy in the aftermath of political violence. Since the 1980s, memory has become firmly entrenched in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences and, little by little, has gained institutional presence. Aside from being a readily identifiable concept with strong semantic and political linkages to human rights, activist culture, and leftist politics, in the academic realm, there are now book series dedicated to memory, specialized journals on the topic, myriad conferences, symposia, working groups, and even graduate programs in the United States, Europe, and Latin America that focus on the subject.

Faced with this surfeit of memory and its pervasiveness in academia and society at large, critics such as Andreas Huyssen have admonished against the dangers of too much memory; others, even those who have done some of the most important work in this area, have warned that the moment for memory has come and gone.¹ Still others believe firmly in “memory studies” [in Spanish, estudios de memoria or estudios sobre memoria(s)] as a productive inter- or transdisciplinary space from which to think about the dynamics of individual, social, and cultural “memory acts” and their potential for strengthening democracies and consolidating cultures of human rights in the aftermath of dictatorships, wars, and other kinds of violent conflicts.

Given the consolidation of memory studies within Latin Americanism, my goal in this chapter is to offer some signposts and questions to invite a conversation about the “memory turn”: the specific trajectories memory studies have taken in Latin America, the challenges the field presents, the field’s possible futures and its pedagogical potential. I will argue that while memory continues to harbor significant pedagogical and political potential for Latin American area studies, scholars of memory studies must seek renewal and remain on guard against an exhaustion of the topic. Of equal importance, we must insist on the repoliticizing—or continued politicizing—of an interdisciplinary space of inquiry that was born out of political struggle and that, through subsequent institutionalization or inertia, can risk losing touch with its activist origins and mission. If we remain mindful of memory studies’ limitations, the field can be a powerful tool for facilitating conversations across disciplinary spaces within the academy, as well as for building bridges between academic and extra-academic spaces, or between politically engaged and committed academics working in the global north and global south.

Memory Studies in the Context of Latin American Studies: Origins and Trajectories

The study of memory within Latin America has really taken root since the 1980s, and more so throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as postdictatorial or postconflict societies have struggled to forge democracies and negotiate the complex meanings of the past.

Outside of Latin America, contemporary memory studies emerged in the mid 1980s in the context of Holocaust studies and focused primarily on memory’s narrative aspects: the difficulties of speaking trauma in the aftermath of the Shoah, the gaps and silences in victims’ posttraumatic narratives, the political and narrative battles between official histories and subaltern histories and memories. These thematic foci provided an initial conceptual map and helped create the conditions of possibility for a series of conversations to emerge within Latin American societies, particularly those of the Southern Cone that were struggling in those same years to understand the dictatorial states in which they were living (in the case of Chile) or from which they were recently emerging (in the cases of Argentina and Uruguay).

In Latin America, then, the “memory turn,” in its first wave (1980s to the mid to late 1990s) was primarily concerned with traumatic memories and the forms they took; it signaled the Freudian tonality of postdictatorial thought while accenting the work of mourning and the fate of the left. In this first wave, works by cultural critics such as Idelber Avelar, Nelly Richard, and Alberto Moreiras were key, as were journals such as Beatriz Sarlo’s Punto de vista in Argentina or Nelly Richard’s Revista de crítica cultural in Chile, all of which played a major role in setting an intellectual agenda for what was still an inchoate area of inquiry; in the realm of the social sciences, books by Guillermo O’Donnell and others fueled reflections on transitions to democracy and the challenges they posed.²

The new millennium brought a second wave in memory studies (mid to late 1990s to the present), largely set in motion by Elizabeth Jelin and the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation’s cosponsored project “Collective Memories of Repression.” This influential project, and the twelve published volumes it yielded, set an early intellectual agenda for a fledgling area of inquiry by bringing into the debate new topics such as archives, memorials, sites, pedagogies, and institutions. From its inception, Jelin’s project had an enormous impact in academic spaces of the global north and south. It sought ways to adapt and expand early reflections on memory and to systematize those reflections by building networks of scholars and publications. All of this resulted in the emergence of a Latin American and Latin Americanist community of memory scholars. As of 2001, Jelin’s initiative was further institutionalized through a master’s program in memory studies offered by the Núcleo de Estudios sobre Memoria (Memory Studies Working Group) at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social, Institute for Economic and Social Development in Buenos Aires.

The “Collective Memories of Repression” project was important not only because of the networks it built and the intellectual work it did but also because it challenged the Southern Cone dictators’ legacy of purging universities of intellectual dissent. The military regimes, as part of their counterrevolutionary backlash of the 1970s and 1980s, eliminated from the region’s universities so-called “subversive” academics that they perceived as threatening to their neoliberal overhauling of society. Jelin’s project, born a decade into the Argentine transition, valiantly worked to rebuild intellectual spaces that had been weakened (though by no means destroyed) by centralizing memory within the Argentine academy and training a generation of young scholars, both from the United States and Latin America.

Without discounting the vital role the “Collective Memories” project played in introducing memory into Latin American and Latin Americanist academic discussions, at the same time we must not lose sight of the fact that memory in Latin America arose, first and foremost, out of political activism and struggle, and only later (or perhaps somewhat simultaneously) became a banner for academics who were themselves activists or who chose to act in solidarity with the political projects of those who most suffered the atrocities of dictatorship. Consequently, memory has a history that deserves to be acknowledged.

Speaking to this point, in her new prologue to Los trabajos de la memoria (1999, 2012; State Repression and the Labors of Memory, 2003), Jelin points out that the original impetus of the “Collective Memories” project was to “critically accompany” (acompañar críticamente) certain social actors, like the families of the disappeared, and think alongside them about their engagements with the recent past. She clarifies in a subsequent interview that the notion of “citizenship”—not memory—was the group’s first entry-point into postdictatorial debates (Mombello 147). By listening carefully to the language deployed by new social movements that were emerging in postdictatorship Argentina, scholars discovered that memory was a term already central to the struggles of human-rights activists. Steve Stern echoes this point for the Chilean case by showing that there was already a tremendous amount of memory struggle happening in post-1973 Chile, long before an academic language of memory took hold. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that memory became readily identifiable and deeply rooted in Chilean society as a cultural “code word” (Stern 122–125). This code word acquired further cultural and political weight following Pinochet’s 1998 detention in London. Today, in Chile, as in other Latin American countries (to greater or lesser extents), we have a Museum of Memory and Human Rights, students evoking memory in the streets, and a language of memory that everyone recognizes as such.

In tandem with this process, throughout the 1990s and even more so in the 2000s, Southern Cone struggles over memory evolved into a full-fledged politics of memory—a much embattled and highly contentious politics, yet a politics nonetheless—that included truth commissions, reparations, and other measures. Put another way, there came a point at which governments could no longer ignore the calls for memory, truth, and justice originating in activist culture and academic spaces.

Admittedly, the focus of Latin American memory studies has for a long time been skewed toward the Southern Cone. Though the transitions to democracy in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay played out differently, the Southern Cone countries share in common that the dictators waged their “dirty wars” against leftist militants in conflicts that were largely one-sided and in which the militants, brutally tortured and repressed in so many ways, had little to no possibility of overcoming that violence. The roles of victims and perpetrators—despite the inevitable grays that always arise—were also fairly clearly delineated. This, of course, was not the case in other Latin American countries such as Peru, Colombia, or Mexico that experienced (or continue to experience) civil conflicts in which the victim–perpetrator binary is much less rigidly defined and in which issues such as race, ethnicity, and indigeneity strongly come into play.³

Since the turn of the millennium, memory studies have consequently undergone an expansion of the field to illuminate the complexities and particularities of Latin American contexts beyond the Southern Cone: most notably, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Mexico. This geographical expansion of the field—which, I would argue, constitutes a “third wave” in Latin American memory studies—begs new questions in so far as experiences of political violence in the Southern Cone and the theorization they generated, though analogous, are not directly translatable or applicable to these other contexts.

Peru and Colombia, for example, are both cases in which a long tradition of studying violence—particularly violence in rural areas—formed the basis for an emerging interest in memory as of the late 1990s and 2000s. From the early years of the Peruvian “armed internal conflict,” social scientists at home and abroad dedicated themselves to understanding the complex nature of the violence and its effects on a largely peasant and indigenous population in Ayacucho. By the mid 1980s, publications such as El Diario Marka or the journal Ideele, along with later edited volumes such as historian Heraclio Bonilla’s Perú en el fin del milenio (1994) or Steve J. Stern’s Los senderos insólitos del Perú: Guerra y sociedad, 1980–1995 (1999), which included contributions by pioneering voices such as Carlos Iván Degregori, Ponciano del Pino, and Jo-Marie Burt, created a vibrant and very public intellectual debate about the conflict. The subsequent participation of Peruvian intellectuals such as Degregori and Del Pino in the SSRC “Memories of Repression” project propelled the emergence of memory studies in Peru. A number of Peruvian case studies soon appeared in a key book that Degregori edited titled Jamás tan cerca arremetió lo lejos: memoria y violencia política en el Perú (2003), which one might argue inaugurated memory studies in that country. The temporal coincidence of Jamás tan cerca with the August 2003 publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC’s) final report created the perfect constellation of events for memory studies to flourish.

Yet, despite the promise that memory held in Peru at the turn of the millennium, it nevertheless seems fair to say that memory studies are not yet as firmly rooted there today as studies of political violence were in the 1980s and 1990s. In the present, political spaces for memory discussions in Peru remain highly conflictive and memory’s uses somewhat limited. For example, Gabriel Salazar Borja argues that the TRC’s emphasis on the need to create a culture based on an “imperative to remember” (una memoria-deber) has attributed to memory a humanitarian function that limits the ability of intellectuals—many of whom continue to uphold the commission’s mandate or who participated directly in it—to use memory as a way to truly critique the present (Degregori et al. 297). To remember past violence has meant, above all, to reflect on the victims—not so much to tackle the gray zones of violence, ambiguous subjectivities, or the political implications of the past for the present. Salazar Borja thus points to a number of challenges for memory studies in Peru: the need to de-link memory studies from an exclusive focus on “victims,” the need to think about memory in locales other than Ayacucho (like Lima, the jungle, or the coca production areas), and the need to create institutional spaces and lend support to emerging groups of young intellectuals who are doing exciting work, like the “Taller de Estudios sobre Memoria Yuyachkanik” at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima) (Degregori et al. 297).

Colombia, according to Marta Cabrera, suffered from a different, though not entirely unrelated problem by the mid 2000s: a prolific grassroots, academic, and artistic production on memory that was ever more voluminous in quantity but sometimes lacking in narrative complexity.⁴ Analogous to Peru in the 1980s and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Studies
• 1 The Memory Turn
• 2 The Transnational Turn
• 3 The Popular Culture Turn
• 4 The Ethical Turn
• 5 The Subalternist Turn
• 6 The Cultural Studies Turn
• 7 The Decolonial Turn
• 8 The Indigenous Studies Turn
• 9 The Performance Turn
• 10 Turning to Feminisms
• 11 The Turn of Deconstruction
• 12 The Cultural Policy Turn
• 13 The Transatlantic Turn
• 14 The Gender and Sexuality Turn
• 15 The Affect Turn
• 16 The Posthegemonic Turn
• Index