The turn of the new millennium has witnessed a growing number of cultural works – films, photographs, novels, plays, and blogs – by the so-called postmemory generations in Latin America. An already significant corpus of critical essays has addressed some of their most common attributes, including the blending of fact and fiction, their playful style, and the difficulties of representing/narrating absence. Comparative analysis of these works is rare, however, and while many studies analyse the cultural memories of children of disappeared parents, the experiences of other “children of the dictatorship” – such as the children of perpetrators or bystanders – are still underexamined. This chapter discusses a series of autofictions from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile of the so-called Literatura de hijos, a popular, albeit not problem-free, term. The issue of content (what to say about the past) is in these narratives directly related to concerns over form (how to say it). Thus, the chapter focuses on how post-dictatorship writers revisit and, more importantly, refashion literary genres – most notably childhood fables, detective stories, and the narratives of exile – simultaneously breathing new life into both the memory of the dictatorial years and the tools that we have to write about them.

Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub both use family narratives to explore ontological and political relationships. In Los informantes, this chapter demonstrates that the father and son embody Nancy’s notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ respectively. Their weaknesses reveal weaknesses of such systems of governance, which Vásquez examines in relation to the historic and contemporary Colombian political context. It is through tactile associations and ‘sharing’ emblematized in the character of a physiotherapist, that the possibility of a ‘horizontal’ politics of ‘interdependence’ is explored. Likewise, in Diário da Queda, a lack of touch and familial intimacy frustrates the happiness of a father and son who are the second and third generation, born to a Holocaust survivor who moved to Brazil. This chapter tackles the novel’s radical critique of Holocaust memory used to bind together a Jewish ‘operative’ community, and to justify violence in the present.

Asian American literature has always focused not only on arrival, immigration, and assimilation, but also on return, transpacific crossings, and transnational connections. Asian American return narratives have described America (Fukuzawa); promoted intercultural understanding (Yung); critiqued repatriate return and rescue (Rizal, Bulosan); revisited the wartime and Cold War conduct of authors' ancestral countries; and addressed the wounds of historical erasure. Japanese American return narratives include immigrant returns (Sugimoto, Reischauer), nisei narratives in which returning to Japan complements accounts of Japanese North American internment or forced removal (Kogawa), wartime returns (Yoshida, Tomita), and sansei scholars' sojourns (Kondo, Minatoya, Mura). Chinese diasporic return narratives describe the PRC when it first reopened to Americans (1971) (Wong, Chiang); a repatriate's persecution (Wu); US sojourns, transpacific family connections, and separation (Kingston, See, Chong). By mythologizing return as a means for second-generation self-discovery and resolution of immigrant loss and mourning (racial melancholia), Amy Tan made Chinese wartime suffering memorable.