Issue No. 7, December 2011 - Institute of Latin American Studies

Memories of repression in Argentina and Uruguaydictatorship and the recent past offered by the Argentine Army inrelation to the memories of other historical periods in Argentina.During the examined period the public positioning of the Armyregarding the recent past transformed from a reactive positionconcerning the stories elaborated by the national government to aconvergent one. Badaró sustains that these transformations respondto the ways in which the Argentine Army has constituted its memoryof the last military dictatorship during the last ten years and to thesymbolic possibilities that the historical frame of the commemorationsof the Bicentenary of Argentina and the public revitalisation of thecategory of “nation” propelled by the last national governments.In the works of Merenson, Nofal, Forné and Daona the symbolicdimension of memories appears clearly connected to the constructionof stories that involve transformations of subjective experiences.Silvina Merenson analyses the interpretations of the present past ofthe men and women employed in the cutting of sugar cane (so called“peludos”) in border city of Bella Union in Uruguay, with the conceptsof time, politics and “sucedidos” as a starting point. Departing from aseries of “sucedidos” understood as “staged micro stories that, alwaysapparently, took place in the far or recent past”, Merenson analyseshow the “peludos” actualize the memories of the recent past – inparticular the seventies– and how they understand them according toa local classificatory system closely related to subjective experiences.For her part, Rossana Nofal carries out a revision of the theoreticalsuppositions that support the definitions of the testimonial genreon the basis of a rereading of the foundational text of the genre inArgentine Literature, Operación masacre (1957) by Rodolfo Walsh. Inthree steps – Inaugurations, Continuities, Ruptures – Nofal explainsthe identitary marks of the testimonial series that Walsh establisheswithin the literary system of Argentine literature.Working from a gender perspective, Anna Forné analysesthe testimonial stories of Memoria para armar, published withinthe bounds of project Taller de Género y Memoria – ex presaspolíticas uruguayas. Through a process of de-victimization andcollective positioning with regards to the emblematic memory, thesestories reconstruct the senses of the past recovering the familiar scenesand themes and by narrating the existential dimension of the memoriesSTOCKHOLM REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIESIssue No. 7, December 20117