Introduction

Summary

In what ways are we ‘touched’ by the past? Are those who have personally experienced the effects of violence the only ones entitled to contest them? Can the rehearsal of trauma bring us pleasure in the present? In the wake of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976–83), the organisations created by the relatives of those missing adopted the form of what I have referred to as a ‘wounded family’. This broken lineage of mothers, grandmothers, children, relatives and siblings of the disappeared has been the guardian of mourning. For more than thirty years, this bloodline assembly of victims has commanded the experience of mourning, transforming the local landscape of memory struggles into a family issue. The tacit cultural rule of the post-dictatorship period stipulates that only those who were directly affected by the military repression are entitled to assume the right to remember. Nonetheless, in the last decade the domiciliation of this archive has started to be displaced: the aftermath of violence has witnessed a controversial displacement of the legitimacy of remembering from the ‘wounded family’ to a collective sense of co-ownership of trauma. Blood has been contested as the only refugee of memory. Yet I contend that the sanctity attached to these biological narratives of grief has prevented local and international scholars from understanding the transmission of trauma on a broader scale.