Title: The Politics of Memory and Oblivion in Redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay
Abstract: The memory of human rights violations that occurred under military rule has continued to haunt the Southern Cone societies following their transition to democracy. With the end in 1983 and 1985 of the respective military dictatorships, the massive extent of such violations was made public in Argentina and Uruguay (as well as in Chile, following the return to democracy in 1990). Parallel to the institutional mechanisms elaborated for treating these violations, a politics of memory and oblivion was generated, which involved contrasting attempts to preserve and diffuse the memory of the past or move beyond past experiences and their varied interpretations. This article analyzes the dynamics of this politics of memory and oblivion in two Southern Cone societies, Argentina and Uruguay. While this selection is basically due to reasons of space, a comparative approach allows us to point out crucial elements in the ways in which intellectuals, victims' relatives, and other agents articulate distinctive patterns of collective memory and oblivion of the shared experience of human rights violations. The analysis of collective memory has become a burgeoning focus of theoretical inquiry in different disciplines, from sociology and anthropology to history and cultural studies. Most of these studies follow the seminal distinction between history and memory developed among others by Pierre Nora. Whereas the concept of history implies an image
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 13
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