Memosur/Memosouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile

The dictatorships of Chile and Argentina lasted from 1973 to 1989 and from 1976 to 1983, respectively. The two countries have thus long since entered the time of commemoration and of a fiercely contested politics of memory. How, though, to remember and commemorate trauma as a political body, without reducing memory and commemoration to political calculation? New social movements have proposed a different sociability of mourning (one is not supposed to dance at funerals…), a new politics and culture of affect. Social media invite us to remember traumas that were never experienced first-hand. More than ever, memory is mediated by technology. This volume examines such matters in a series of essays covering the centres of detention, museums and memory sites, film, documentary, television, theatre, fiction and the press, LGBT and other testimonies, education, accusatory practices, the politics of memory and mourning, and the Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo. They deal with the memory, commemoration and trauma of the Pinochet and March 1976 coups, as well as of the Falklands-Malvinas War, in an exploration of post-dictatorship Argentina and Chile.