Showcasing dictatorship: Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile

Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 69-93

  Andermann, Jens ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH   (Switzerland)

Author keywords

Empathy; Memorial museum; Memorial museum aesthetics; Rosario; Santiago

Indexed keywords

EID: 84872125433     PISSN: 20416938     EISSN: 20416946     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3167/jemms.2012.040205     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 8.
2. "Redistributive justice" is a concept developed in the context of the South African postapartheid transition, where it refers to a supposedly "forward-looking" public revisiting of apartheid crimes by both perpetrators and victims in front of the official Truth Commission, which bestows public recognition on the victims' experiences without penalizing repressors who confess their crimes. See, on the role of museums and visual culture in the South African transition, Annie Coombes, Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). In Latin America, the term "posttransitional justice" has been promoted by Cath Collins as a way of comparing advances and constraints in postdictatorial legal prosecutions across the region. From the perspective of political philosophy and critical theory, it has been criticized by Idelber Avelar, among others, for the way it privileges the "transition" from authoritarian to democratic regimes over the socioeconomic continuity of the neoliberal model installed by the Latin American dictatorships-which thus should be seen as the real "transition" from a national-popular to market-driven hegemonization of the social.
3. See Cath Collins, Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)
4. Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
5. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und kulturelle Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: C. H. Beck, 2007)
6. Marianne Hirsch, "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory, " Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5-37
7. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004).
8. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 2. "Postmemory, " therefore, does not imply, as the Argentine cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo believes in her booklong attack on attempts to apply the concept to recent Argentine film and literature, a "subjective turn" that narcissistically privileges personal emotional responses over historical fact. Rather, it has to do with a different mode of subjective engagement with history, which is if anything less introspective than the previous one, as it has to feed on the public and mediated rather than personal and intimate materials.
9. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo: Una discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2001).
10. Williams, Memorial Museums, 51.
11. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
12. The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums is currently made up of seventeen accredited "sites of conscience" (six in the United States, five in Europe, three in Africa, two in Latin America, and one in Asia). There are also a further 260 institutional members. See http://www.sitesofconscience.org, accessed December 2011.
13. For a detailed list of current members, see http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/redlatinoamericana/redlatinoamericana/, accessed December 2012.
14. Elsewhere, I have discussed in more detail one emblematic case of such a contested memorial site, the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA) at Buenos Aires. See Jens Andermann, "Returning to the Site of Horror: On the Reclaiming of Clandestine Concentration Camps in Argentina, " Theory, Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 76-98.
15. On the museum's relation with nation-state formation in Latin America, see Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)
16. Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
17. Valerie Casey, "The Museum Effect: Gazing From Object to Performance in the Contemporary Cultural-Historical Museum, " in Archives and Museum Informatics, Europe: Cultural Institutions and Digital Technology (conference proceedings, École du Louvre, Paris, 2003).
18. Williams, Memorial Museums, 97.
19. Teresa Meade, "Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile's 'Sitios de la Memoria' and the History of Torture, Disappearance and Death, " Radical History Review 79 (2001): 124-125.
20. On the Villa Grimaldi and the Chilean memorial landscape, see Jens Andermann, "Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape, " Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 165-187
21. Michael J. Lazzara, "Tres recorridos de Villa Grimaldi, " in Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2003), 127-147
22. Patrizia Violi, "Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum, " Theory, Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 36-75.
23. Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25.
24. Conversation with María Luisa Ortiz, Santiago, Chile, April 2011.
25. Williams, Memorial Museums, 33.
26. Timothy Brown, "Trauma, Museums, and the Future of Pedagogy, " Third Text 18, no. 4 (2004): 250.
27. Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex, " New Formations 4 (1988): 92.
28. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 70.
29. For an overview of sites currently in operation, see the lists compiled by the Asociación Memoria Abierta (http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/sitiosar gentina.php), the Instituto Espacio de la Memoria of the city of Buenos Aires (http://www.institutomemoria.org.ar/_ccdte/exccd.html), and the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria, Córdoba (http://www.apm.gov.ar/node).
30. Conversation with Rubén Chababo, Rosario, Argentina, December 2011.
31. The display provoked a diplomatic incident shortly after the museum's opening when, on an official visit to mark the international day of human rights, the Israeli ambassador stumbled upon the inclusion of his own country on the world map of human rights violations and left the exhibition under protest, subsequently filing complaints with the municipal and federal governments. Here-as well as in the stories collected in Tapparelli's Mémora piece, which includes references to "democratic" Latin American countries as well as to socialist Cuba-the Rosario museum, as a municipal rather than national institution, but also because of the way it privileges artistic over "straightforward" historical representations, appears once again more ready to take risks than its Chilean peer. Conversation with Rubén Chababo, Rosario, Argentina, December 2011.
32. Williams, Memorial Museums, 48.
33. Williams, Memorial Museums, 48.
34. At the time of writing, the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera had to shelve, in the face of massive local and international protests, its project to replace the term "dictatorship" in the Chilean school curriculum with the more general expression "military regime. " See Cristina Moyano, "Dictadura o régimen militar: La disputa por la nominación del pasado, " El Mostrador, 9 January 2012, accessed January 2012, http://www.elmostrador.cl/opinion/ 2012/01/05/dictadura-o-regimen-militar-la-disputa-por-la-nominacion-delpasado/.
35. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 36.
36. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Palo Alto, CA: Stan ford University Press, 1999), 58.