Literature, Trauma, and Human Rights

doi:10.1017/9781108976459.003

Chapter 2 - Literature, Trauma, and Human Rights

from Part I - Security

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022

Ana Forcinito

Edited by

Mónica Szurmuk and

Debra A. Castillo

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Mónica Szurmuk: Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de San Martín and National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina
Debra A. Castillo: Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York

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Summary

This chapter underscores the role that literature played not only in articulating the demands for justice that accompanied human rights struggles after the military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s but also in offering a space for the reconstruction of narrative memory and the exploration (and reinterpretation) of the traumatic events of the past. As neoliberalism was imposed with mass killings, clandestine detention, enforced disappearance, torture, and rape, many literary narratives gave visibility to criminal and clandestine illegal practices and created alternative archives, in those cases in which the official ones had been erased. Latin American literature became one of the most privileged spaces for the construction of memory in post-dictatorships. Linked to human rights struggles and processes of democratization, different aesthetics of memory expanded the notion of memory coming from legal and judicial discussions, as well as from the approaches of the social sciences. On the one hand, the literary texts I will discuss in this chapter exposed illegal forms of violence, responding to the urgency of making them public. On the other hand, they delved into different ways of representing traumatic experiences as well as the borders, silences, and fragments of the recollections of the past. In this chapter, I will approach the aesthetics of memory from different angles, from the emphasis on the crimes to the silence and forgetting, to the analysis of the relationship between the body and affect, or the long-lasting effects of violence and trauma in the present, and even the difficulties of remembering and of making sense of painful experiences.

Keywords

memory affect trauma human rights testimony

Type: Chapter
Information: Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018 , pp. 30 - 46

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976459.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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