Contenu du sommaire : La Mémoire et ses représentations esthétiques en Amérique latine /2

R. Arenas committed suicide on the 7th of December 1990 in New York when he was in the last phase of HIV infection. However, before ending his life, he tried to complete his work El Color del verano, la Pentagonía,the first four volumes of which were already on sale. He finished his book of memories  Antes que anochezca by revising the third poem of the poetic trilogy, Leprosorio. It's hard to believe that he could set himself such an enormous task whilst enduring the last stages of disease. A sense of failure infuses his last three works but feelings of hatred become much more apparent when he refers to the cause of this failure, Fidel Castro. The most interesting aspect of the aesthetic representation is related to the changeable nature of memory and how the inconstancy of this exiled writer's memories help to develop the work he started months or – in the instance of Leprosorio - even years ago. At the same time, those changes affect also his interpretation of the irreparable twilight that lights up at the last moment and which creates the certainty of unlimited liberty achievable at the final limits of life and by himself alone.

The term « places of memory », proposed by Pierre Nora is the point of departure for an analysis of two novels written during the Chilean democratic transition. El palacio de la risa by Germán Marín, and Una casa vacía by Carlos Cerda could be seen as a variation on the same theme : the private houses that were used as torture centres during the Pinochet regime. In this article, on the one hand I examine the way in which these authors construct literary space on the base of individual and collective memory. On the other, I try to define the influence the conversion of homes into deposits of terror could have left in the imaginary of the house in those two novels.

This article analyzes the construction of the female protagonist in Luisa Valenzuela's book Cambio de armas through a consideration of critical observations on the theme of violence by authors such as George Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Rainer Maria Rilke, Michel Foucault, and Wolfgang Sofsky, among others. We establish a variety of links between violence and eroticism showing how, in Valenzuela's story, this relationship is revealed through the love story of the main characters Roque and Laura.

The article analyses the novel by Carlos Gamerro El secreto y las voces in the framework of the texts studying the memory issues of the last Argentinian dictatorship. The purpose here is to shed light on the narrative devices used to describe the logical manipulations, the verbal shift and the social mechanisms that contributed to configure a society globally accomplice of the crimes committed by the dictatorship, be it by naturalization or concealment. The silence plot is difficult to counter, and when the speech finally returns, it carries other unsensed secrets and shows that all the consciences have, in one way or another, lacked vigilance.

The novel that Alonso Cueto wrote in 2005 is good food for thoughts about the relationship between a particular man and memories : his own memory and the memory of his country. The meeting between the hero and his father's lover –the father took part in the dirty war against Shining Path in the 1980's– gives Adrián Ornache the opportunity to discover his own personal history. Metaphorically speaking, the text can be read as an esthetic representation of Peruvian memory. As such, it  will help the reader to better understand the country violent situation. Besides, the book recalls the action of the CVR when the woman tells her own story in order to bear witness of her trauma. In this article our main goal is to try and link both positions. In this novel, truth and history revolve around the woman's body. Indeed, it is a devastated body, such as the Peruvian memory is, and therefore, it  gradually becomes a dead body. In order to escape her own past which she cannot  forget, she decides to commit suicide and thus transforms the main character into the new spokesman for memory.

This article makes the assumption that the bodyof the texts constituted by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, Mexico, 1994-2001) form an aesthetic object rooted in memory. Thetexts do indeed present themselves as a memory of resistance and as an alternative for the collective memory'sreconstruction that transgress both ideologies and historical fatalities and that assert the livingmemory of othersubalterns. These texts appear a creatively constructed landscape, couched in a visible materiality in which the eye is convened to another sighting of senses ; when it is the glance that makes the voices seen. Writingspreads itself entirely over the renovation of the possible enunciations. It engages, in turn, the ancestral legitimacy of mythical heroes and utopian horizons, memory and silence ; and also, beyond, a reader shaken by aesthetics, this sensation released by the words. By transfiguring the universe of speech into a universe of feelings, the poetical and aesthetic neo-Zapatista production presents anew sharing of sensibility : another political organization of the world.

Often it is the victims who remember the violence they have suffered at the hands of brutal powers. Bolaño, on the contrary, explores the memory of the semi-guilty, the memory of someone belonging to what Primo Levi called, “ The Gray Area ”. Such a person is Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, who, in a long monologue, reminisces about the years of dictatorship and his complicit acceptance of the regime. The essay sets out to show how the protagonist achieves a series of displacements, digressions, superfluous position-honing, euphemistic descriptions, so as to postpone confrontation with the more-difficult-to-face memories of the dictatorship. These strategies of confrontation/non-confrontation with the past is telling of the difficulty for many Latin-Americans to admit that they have been complicit in the dictatorship in different ways. The multiple figures of displacements are at the foundation of the comic nature of the text, which highlights the tragically ridiculous aspects of many other denial discourses of other discourse in search of an impossible self-absolution.

This paper shows some findings of our ongoing research project dealing with the recuperation of literary memory in the province of Misiones by analysing a compilation of the literary manuscripts by the most representative authors of this northern region of Argentina. Here, we follow Fernado Ainsa's notions of canon and periphery, of memory spaces and construction of utopias. Ainsa sees the act of writing as a genetic process for it originates within a personal, visceral, and solitary realm. For Ainsa, writing is also a permanent search for identity which becomes richer when in contact with the world, when frontiers open up. These concepts allow us to interpret the social practices that gave birth to these aesthetic projects far away from Argentina's power centers.

Though memory may be most often used term within the historic context of Argentina, it is oblivion which dominates finally the public discourse of recent years. What are the different forms of “ remembering ” the painful past in an environment that attempts to silence memory by transforming it into a fetish-object ? In which way the urban space —the city with its multiple open and closed places— conserves a memory of the tragedy and horror ? And, how this space is represented within the narrative text ? This work analyzes the problematic of the globalized city, its post-trauma and oblivion by studying Horacio Vázquez-Rial's novel, La capital del olvido (“ City of Oblivion ”, 2004). Additionally, it offers to analyze the effects of globalization and privatization processes that swept Buenos Aires during the decade of the nineties, in order to explore the diversity of public and private expressions of a culture of shame and guilt that refuses to remember its past.

Since a coincidence – the publication in 1980 of Nadie nada nunca (Nobody nothing never) by Juan José Saer, Respiración artificial (Artificial breathing) by Ricardo Piglia and La cámara lúcida (The lucid camera), Roland Barthes´s last book – the article reflects upon Time and the rescue of the meaning of a past experience. Barthes presents, through the study of photography, the impossibility of bereavement. Piglia considers that the meaning of the future can be read in the past. Then, Saer´s invariable present can be sensed full of a tragic past and a sinister future.

One of the characteristics of postmodernity has been the crisis of the great stories. From the decay of the language, of the history and in general of all the theoretical disciplines and the redentores speeches, the credibility has been transferred to mass media. Or Angel Rama or Jean Franco indicated that its influence is immense in the present society and is determining in the structure and content of new novels. Thus fragmentary speeches arise in where the self-reference is very important and in where the anecdote of history, of the tradition acquires a playful and exemplary function in a world in where prime the malaise and where the identities seem erased. The metaliterature is elevated thus in works of Piglia, Pauls, Roncagliolo, Fresán in reflection means on the own identity. This work tries to reflect on these aspects in the work of Roberto Bolaño.

In this article we treat the actions of political repression and violence on the borders of South America and in the Cone Sul in the 1970s, rescued by the documentary film Ballad for Tenório Jr. held in 1986.

In 1964, the military dictatorship took hold of Brazil and imposed its censorship in all levels. At this moment, the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar takes part into a group of Latin-American writers whose members are connected to the Magic Realism. This group searches for literary stratagems, such as the allegorical and metaphorical discourse, in order to criticize the government. Thus, the emergence of this new aesthetic representation calls forth a revisit of the past, in which the memory aesthetically rearranges the remembrances. Taking this context into account, we propose to analyze the novel « Sa Majesté des Indiens », (1997) in which the time of the narrative is mingled with the Brazilian dictatorship context, by examining the way in which Moacyr Scliar makes use of the official history and how the writer, through some historical characters, builds an utopian imaginary based on a cultural and ideological fusion in order to escape the censorship.

The binominal colony-metropolis was always a delicate equation in the relation between Brazil and Portugal. These differences were particularly accentuated in 20th Century, above all after the reaffirmation of the Brazilian independence, in the cultural sphere, in 1922. However, we observe that since the beginning of the last century a part of the Luso-Brazilian intellectuality and, especially, some writers and the men of letters of both countries linked to the political totalitarian regimes tried to cultivate a false image and idea of « cordiality and cooperation » through the press, realizing in this way a indirect propaganda of their dictatorial government. In this direction, we want to show with our work a brief itinerary of this dialogue established in the Luso-Brazilian press especially in the period of both dictatorships.

Many Argentines today welcome with keen interest certain aesthetic undertakings directly related to the crimes of the last dictatorship. The most popular among these undertake to recreate memory on the basis of a « consensual » vision of the past. Others are more disquieting because they stem from a more demanding scrutiny on the past and our consciousness of it. The sculpture / installation entitled « Autores ideológicos » (Ideological Authors), now permanently exhibited at ex ESMA (the Military School where abducted persons were illegally sequestered and submitted to torture) belongs to the latter category. Its material support is a Ford Falcon which was actually used for abductions. This article proposes, through the description of the creative process resulting in the sculpture, to give an account of the current questioning on memory addressed by the artists to society and to art.

The contribution analyses some literary and filmic texts which offer different modes of appropriation of the military dictatorships in order to show that literature and film serve different functions of making memory, fighting against forgetting, illuminating certain traumatic zones of this period and its repercussions in the present, asking for the possibilities of the coexistence of victims and offenders.

In 2005, the Colombian painter Fernando Botero exhibited at Rome fifty works (triptychs, paintings and drawings) on torture committed by American soldiers in Abou Ghraib prison, the consequences of the war in Iraq and the attacks of September 11 2001. After dealing with the violence in Colombia, Botero expanded the scope of his testimony aesthetic, human and politic, on a theme that also concerns Guantanamo prisoners. In societies more and more globalized these works raise questions about the need to represent a « meta-memory » and the consequences of impunity and government violence. They also reveal the interaction of speaches on art and societies in the operation of memory: explicit references to Goya and Picasso review of these works, the relation between those texts, photographs and pictorial works but also terms of aesthetic representation in the immediate context of history.

The issue pointed out by Puenzo is about this tiny lapse between the film release and the events it relates. This proximity gives the words their whole density, because here we need to utter the unspeakable. Alicia goes in search of truth, an untold and unbelievable truth, she faces the untold with the May Square Mothers. The film shows how official history is a lie cracking up to allow memory and reveal the unofficial history, concealed up to now. Puenzo focuses on this particular moment, this hinge between memory and History.Yet, is Historias Minimas a history amnesiac film ? It isn't, it's « a plot with little substance », where action has for frame the open landscapes of the Southern territory.  Buenos Aires vertical barbarity is opposed to San Julian's horizontal peacefulness, San Julian where it all began !

In Argentina, during the years of repression, first under Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship (1966) then under Rafael Videla's (1976), the theatre was a form of escapism. Yet it was also a means of expression which staged human habits and behaviours. This studying attempts to show that Griselda Gambaro's theatre both emphasizes the dangers of the arbitrariness of a tyrannical power and the role of dramatic art as an aesthetic representation of memory.

The fictional dialogue between Julio Cortázar and Carlos Alonso, based upon a comparative approach, is a fictional exposition which reflects upon the wounds of the Argentinian dictatorship. Cortazar's short stories and Alonso's paintings redynamize anamnesis the –praxis of recollection – which victims of the Argentinian dictatorship and later generations - have to make through catharsis to be able to appropriate a regenerated memory, allowing the policy of fair memory to flourish. To overcome the conflict between the survivors of the dictatorship and Official History, Cortázar and Alonso are the transhistorical mediators who deconstruct the sclerotic ways of thinking History and making memory.

During the 60s and until today, in Buenos Aires, has taken place a series of artistic expressions accompanying institutional and political events, which has resulted in a constant practice of reflection and a space for memory within the social fabric.   

This paper is based on a communicative and contextual analysis that accounts for the identification and interpretation of communicative practices conducted by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, filial Cordoba under the governments of Raúl Alfonsin, Carlos Menem and Néstor Kirchner since his mandates had big differences in human rights policies. The organization could use vast expressive forms and/or aesthetic purposes communicational, political, social and cultural factors that made possible the achievement of its objectives. The communication, initially without knowing it, provided greater possibilities for their daily struggle and perseverance:this allowed a reaffirmation in the public spaces, the construction of a memory and a strong collective identity and with great social standing, reinforced internal unity and multiplied social external networks. Therefore, the practices operated as pillars in the search for the grandchildren priority increasingly its completion.

These last years, in Colombia, there are more and more publications of stories and diaries written by the kidnapped victims. This kind of stories becomes one of the conflict victims' tools in their fight for recognition. Are the publications of victims' personal stories the new ways to expose and denounce violence? How is the narrator located in his relation with his society? Going through the kidnapped victims' diaries and personal stories, I propose to show the effects of this kind of writings in the conflict management by the victims.

The Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires was built in 1924. In 1975, a building of the property was converted into a concentration camp. It served as such until the end of the last dictatorship in Argentina, in 1983. Five thousand people have been illegally sequestered at the ESMA. The majority of which were never seen again. In 2004, the Néstor Kirchner administration announced the return of the property to the Buenos Aires city and the National Executive. The Kirchner administration later proclaimed the transformation of the place into a « Space for the Memory and for the Promotion of Human Rights ». Although essential and having contributed to the edification of the lieu de mémoire that ESMA became, these events were not creators of the birth of ESMA as a state terrorism emblem. The creation of the lieu de mémoire has a story before 2004. This creation can be explained by the spread of information that associated ESMA with the dictatorship horror and by the recognition of its emblematic nature by different actors.

The present work follows the tracks of the artistic and symbolical issues, and their impact on people's memory around the events that were happened on December 22th 1997 in the community of Acteal, Chiapas. This paper assumes that the preservation and symbolization of the State's violence are action ways of a counter-power and signs of resistance from those which, as far as the modern political philosophy, should be the owners of the sovereignty, that is to say, the people. This symbolical tendence was a footprint of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), since the first days of its uprising, on January 1994. After twelve days of fighting against the Mexican Army, it was perhaps the discursive and symbolical core through the people's consciousness, which stopped the hostilities and set the conflict in a different stage. The photography, the cartoon, were added to sociological and journalistic speeches, creating a new kind of discursive structure with a strong aesthetical issue. In other hand, at this new and revolutionary strategy accounted a counter- revolutionary phase, which most significant file was Acteal's massacre. The response actions of the movement, instead the direct fighting, were the exercise of this symbolical counter-power. At 1997, the ways were mostly influenced by the painting, the sculpture, the poetry and the poster, besides the other kinds mentioned above. So, this work shows examples of those representations in the mentioned genres, under the fact that these ones are political counterparts to State's violence and they seek an interpellation effect to a peaceful way of solving the conflict in that region.