The Politics of Postmemory Violence and PDF

The Politics of Postmemory
Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture
Geoffrey Maguire
palgrave macmillan memory studies

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, United Kingdom
John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development
of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contrib-
uted to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last
thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural
shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and for-
get. This groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is
‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the
prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the con-
ceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and
illumination?
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14682
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Geoffrey Maguire
The Politics of
Postmemory
Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary
Argentine Culture
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Geoffrey Maguire
Murray Edwards College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-51604-2 ISBN 978-3-319-51605-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51605-9
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gwm23@cam.ac.uk
For my parents
who made everything possible
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Acknowledgements
Writing this book would have proved a much more difficult task without
the support and encouragement of numerous colleagues and friends at
the University of Cambridge. In particular, I owe an enormous debt of
gratitude to the staff and research students from the Centre of Latin
American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, whose
generous advice and critical insight have been both influential and moti-
vational. My deepest thanks go to Joanna Page; I could not have wished
for a more inspiring mentor and colleague, and I will be forever grate-
ful for her unswerving support and reassurance. I am also indebted to
the Cambridge Home and European Scholarship Scheme, the Pigott
Scholars Programme and the Research Fellowship Committee of Murray
Edwards College, which have provided me with the opportunity to con-
centrate exclusively on research.
The ideas and arguments that have gone into this book have been dis-
cussed and debated with many people along the way. In Cambridge, my
thanks go to Geoffrey Kantaris and Ed King for their invaluable contri-
butions and general support, as well as to my fellow Alcovists for their
friendship, enthusiasm and humour over the years. The Centre of Latin
American Studies has provided an immensely rich and rewarding envi-
ronment for my research over the past six years, and particular thanks go
to Julie Coimbra, whose laughter and kindness have provided me with
many fond memories. To my friends in St. Edmund’s College, I thank
you for your support and for your distraction, which were often given in
equal measure. In St. Andrews, my thanks go to Eleni Kefala, who first
vii
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
viii Acknowledgements
introduced me to Argentina, and to Catherine Barbour, who has been a

source of positivity ever since.
I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to have had the opportunity
to discuss the novels, films, photography collections and plays contained
in this book with the writers, directors and artists themselves. As such, I
would like to thank Patricio Pron, Paula Markovitch, Lola Arias, Gabriela
Bettini, Gustavo Germano and Inés Ulanovsky for generously shar-
ing their work, and their thoughts, with me. Numerous research trips
to Buenos Aires have been made possible by the financial assistance of
various funding bodies, to which I owe debt of gratitude: specifically, St.
Edmund’s College, the Simón Bolívar Fund, the Santander Travel Fund
and the Murray Edwards Fellows’ Research Fund. My appreciation, too,
extends to the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Studies in
Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, who have generously allowed me
to reproduce previously published work here, which respectively form
parts of Chapters Two (‘Bringing Memory Home’, Vol. 23, No. 2) and
Four (‘Playing in Public’, Vol. 14, No. 1).
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, without whom this
project—and all those that came before—would not have been possible.
Their unwavering support and resolute belief in my abilities have been,
and continue to be, a source of constant reassurance and motivation.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Contents
1 Introduction: The Second Generation in Contemporary

Argentina 1
1.1 The Return of Politics 5
1.2 The Postmemory Generation 12
1.3 Los rubios and the Structure of the Book 19
References 28
2 The Copyright Generation: Historical Memory and the

Childrenof the Disappeared 33
2.1 Part One: Soy un bravo piloto and the Limits
of Autofiction 36
2.2 Part Two: Bringing Memory Home: Historical Memory
and El espíritu de mis padres 55
2.3 Conclusion: Postmemorial F(r)ictions 73
References 78
3 ‘HIJOS de una misma historia’: Identity Politics

and Parody in the Kirchner Era 81
3.1 Part One: Traitors, Torturers and Transvestites:
Subverting the Political Family in Los topos 83
3.2 Conclusion 104
ix
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
x Contents
3.3 Part Two: A Disneyland of Human Rights:

The Language of Parody in Diario de una
Princesa Montonera 105
3.4 Conclusion: Politicised Mourning,Parodic Memory 125
References 129
4 Hijos guerrilleros: Childhood Militancy

and Cinematic Memory 133
4.1 Part One: Militancy, Memory and Make-Believe:
Politicising Childhood in Infancia clandestina 135
4.2 Part Two: Domestic Politics and Prosthetic
Memory in El premio 157
4.3 Conclusion: Spectacular Childhoods 176
References 179
5 Performing Loss: Materiality and the Repertoire

of Absence 183
5.1 Part One: Materiality and the Archive in Contemporary
Argentine Photography 186
5.2 Part Two: Performing the Archive in Mi vida después 213
5.3 Conclusion: Beyond Archive Fever 232
References 236
6 Conclusion: The Politics of Postmemory 241

References 250
Index 253
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 ‘Conversación con Antonio’, Recuerdos inventados,

Gabriela Bettini 2
Fig. 4.1 Infancia clandestina, dir. by Benjamín Ávila 144
Fig. 4.6 El premio, dir. by Paula Markovitch 159
Fig. 5.1 Photograph from Fotos tuyas, Inés Ulanovsky 187
Fig. 5.4 Photograph from Filiación, Lucila Quieto 193
Fig. 5.6 ‘Mi tío Marcelo’, Recuerdos inventados, Gabriela Bettini 199
Fig. 5.9 Photograph from Ausencias, Gustavo Germano 211
xi
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Second Generation

in Contemporary Argentina
The opening image (Fig. 1.1) from Gabriela Bettini’s photo-essay

Recuerdos inventados (2002–2003) not only reflects many of the aes-
thetic strategies and ideological motivations of Argentina’s post-dicta-
torship generation of writers, directors and artists, but it also provides
an effective visual introduction to much of the discussion contained
within The Politics of Postmemory. Entitled ‘Conversación con Antonio’
(Conversation with Antonio), yet strategically stressing the impossibility
of any such intergenerational dialogue, Bettini’s photograph directs the
spectator’s gaze not towards the two-dimensional image of her disap-
peared grandfather but to her own position as the contemporary inter-
locutor of this turbulent cultural heritage. At the same time, the image
intimates the potential for disconnection and misunderstanding inher-
ent in the meeting between these two distinct generations. ‘Imagen
tan imposible como poderosa’, writes the Argentine critic Luis Ignacio
García in Políticas de la memoria y de la imagen: ‘La reflexividad de la
imagen se replica en la reflexividad de una memoria que se tematiza a
sí misma’ (An image as impossible as it is powerful. The reflexivity of
the image is mirrored in the reflexivity of a memory that focuses on
itself) (2011: 95). As Bettini’s collection progressively sketches a trans-
ferral of subjectivity from the previous generation to the next through
the parodic juxtaposition of the children’s presence against the static
one-dimensionality of the past, the inclusion of the Nunca más report
© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Maguire, The Politics of Postmemory, Palgrave Macmillan
Memory Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51605-9_1
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
2 G. Maguire
Fig. 1.1 ‘Conversación con Antonio’, Recuerdos inventados, Gabriela Bettini
in this initial image also serves to focalise the affective register of the cul-
tural transmission at stake. As the metaphor par excellence for the legal
and societal upheavals in Argentine society since the disappearance of
Bettini’s grandfather, the report infuses the photograph with consider-
able cultural reference and also functions as the metonymic indicator for
the underlying political tensions in the work of an entire generation.
While the writers, directors and artists contained within this book
were either not yet born at the time of their parents’ disappearances or,
in the majority of cases, too young to remember the events in detail, the
political and traumatic consequences of Argentina’s last military dicta-
torship (1976–1983) have nevertheless exerted a significant impact on
any present sense of personal or collective identity. For the Uruguayan
sociologist Gabriel Gatti, the forced disappearance of left-wing militants
during the Dirty War’s repression has led to the formation of ‘un dis-
curso distinto’ (a distinct discourse) among their children, an approach
to representing the past in which ‘hay algo que tiene que ver con una
cierta experiencia normalizada de la catástrofe’ (there is something akin
to a certain normalized experience of catastrophe) (2008: 114, emphasis
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
1 INTRODUCTION: THE SECOND GENERATION … 3
in original). Furthermore, in a discussion of generational agency in the

post-dictatorship context, the Argentine critic Daniel Feierstein writes,
‘El cuestionamiento de los hijos podría constituir una oportunidad para,
a la vez, quebrar la hegemonía denegatoria de sus padres y […] per-
mitirse construir juntos otro sentido’ (The children’s questioning may
provide an opportunity both to break the restrictive hegemony of their
parents and […] to enable them to construct another sense together)
(2011: 585, emphasis in original). It is both the individual and genera-
tional experiences of loss and absence, and the dynamic and problematic
relationship between them, that will be examined through the literature,
film and visual art contained within this book. Through the critical lens
of ‘postmemory’, coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe the mediated
experience that ‘the “generation after” bears to the personal, collec-
tive, and cultural trauma of those who came before’ (2012: 5, emphasis
in original), the present study examines how this second generation’s
‘discurso distinto’ and ‘otro sentido’ have been articulated against the
social, political and cultural backdrop of contemporary Argentina.1
Where conventional critical approaches have tended to focalise sig-
nificance on psychoanalytic and largely European notions of collec-
tive trauma, The Politics of Postmemory instead calls for these distinctly
Argentine expressions of postmemory to be read with a heightened
theoretical sensitivity towards their intrinsic political core; a politics not
simply of memory, but one which also encompasses issues of genera-
tional identity, historical representation and the recent institutionalisa-
tion of victimhood itself.
Though elaborated in the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust,2
the analytical concept of postmemory has been of significant use in
recent Argentine cultural studies, with many critics persuasively employ-
ing the paradigm to explore the work of this second generation. Most
notably, these works include Susana Kaiser’s Postmemories of Terror
(2005), Brenda Werth’s Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics
in Argentina (2010), Ana Ros’ The Post-Dictatorship Generation
in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural
Production (2012), Cecilia Sosa’s Queering Acts of Mourning in the
Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship (2014) and Jordana Blejmar’s
Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina
(2017). These publications have been instrumental in distinguishing
the discrete mechanisms employed by the second generation in their
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
4 G. Maguire
elaboration of cultural memory, and have effectively served to define

and disseminate a preliminary corpus of contemporary cultural output
produced by the children of the disappeared. The Politics of Postmemory
builds on, and deliberately challenges, many of the assertions fore-
grounded by this emerging body of work, reviewing and revising the
theoretical framework of postmemory and its deployment within the
contemporary Argentine context. In this sense, the book heeds Andreas
Huyssen’s directive in Present Pasts to historicise discrete discourses of
memory within their respective socio-political contexts: ‘Although the
Holocaust as a universal trope of traumatic history has migrated to other,
nonrelated contexts,’ he writes, ‘one must always ask whether and how
the trope enhances or hinders local memory practices and struggles, or
whether and how it may help and hinder at the same time’ (2003: 16).
As the aforementioned recent critical studies have shown, the postme-
morial paradigm does indeed serve as a particularly effective means of
analysing the aesthetic and formal innovations of this post-dictatorship
generation, principally in terms of the ‘imaginative investment, projec-
tion, and creation’ (2012: 5) that Hirsch sees as a defining characteristic
of all postmemorial texts. This study, however, refines this critical frame-
work by arguing that the distinct cultural and socio-political ‘memory
practices and struggles’ of contemporary Argentina must also be taken
into account in a more active and thorough manner if the theoretical
framework of postmemory is to remain a productive and appropriate
analytical lens.
As this Introduction will discuss in further depth, the landscape of
cultural memory in Argentina has changed considerably since the turn
of the century, with the emergence of new political and social actors
and the development of distinct, progressively politicised, forms of
commemoration. If, on one hand, as Vincent Druliolle explains, ‘The
early 1990s were marked by a lull in human rights mobilizations, […]
prompted by the pardon and the hyperinflation that plagued the country
from 1989 to 1990’ (2011: 15), then, on the other, the beginning of
the twenty-first century has experienced a significant ‘explosion of mem-
ory’ (Crenzel 2011: 5). In their seminal work on contemporary cultural
memory, the Argentine sociologists Elizabeth Jelin and Susana Kaufman
have described this new stage of commemoration as a series of compet-
ing and conflicting ‘layers of memory’ (2002: 42). They write:
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
[I]n the current socio-cultural Argentine context […], it is impossible

to find one memory. There is an active political struggle about meaning,
about the meaning of what went on and also about the meaning of mem-
ory itself. The ‘memory’ camp is not a unified and homogenous front.
There are struggles that emerge from the confrontation among different
actors within it: struggles over appropriate means and forms of commemo-
ration, about the content of what should be remembered publicly, and also
about the legitimacy of different actors to embody memory (the issue of
the “ownership” of memory). (2002: 41)
It is within this new dynamic and contested arena of cultural memory,

driven principally by the ongoing work of human rights organisations,
by the creation and growth of HIJOS (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad
y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio)3 in the late 1990s, and later
by the installation of Néstor Kirchner as President of Argentina in 2003,
that The Politics of Postmemory positions itself. By drawing on a wide
range of cultural material from this second generation, the study both
explores the immense social, political and legal milestones that have been
achieved in recent years by human rights organisations and successive
Kirchner governments, and questions how an emerging generation of
writers, directors and visual artists are—often controversially—entering
into this ‘political struggle about meaning, about the meaning of what
went on and also about the meaning of memory itself’. Indeed, if con-
temporary Argentine society may be characterised by this new approach
to the recent past, in which the figure of the hijo has become a paradig-
matic emblem of the country’s newfound search for justice and retribu-
tion, then those sons and daughters contained within this study, through
their politicised operations of postmemory, have begun to problematise
the subject positions that have been attributed to them and actively ques-
tion what happens when such private narratives of familial grief take cen-
tre stage in the public world of politics.
1.1 The Return of Politics

In August 2014, the discovery of Argentina’s 114th niño apropiado
marked a crucial milestone in the work of the country’s human rights
organisations.4 Two years after Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted for his
part in the dictatorship’s systematic appropriation of an estimated 500
children, taken from left-wing militants during their internment in the
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
6 G. Maguire
regime’s centros clandestinos,5 the momentous and highly publicised

reunion of Ignacio ‘Guido’ Hurban and his maternal grandmother was a
particularly significant event for Argentine society. As the missing grand-
son of Estela de Carlotta, current President and founding member of the
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the ‘recuperation’ of Hurban’s identity not
only brought an end to his grandmother’s very public and well-known
search for justice, but also reignited political support for the organisa-
tion, acting as a reminder to society of the pivotal questions surround-
ing the dictatorship period that remain unanswered. ‘[La recuperación]
no tiene que ver sólo con la historia de cada nieto’, declared Hurban
during his first press conference, ‘sino con la historia de la Argentina’
(This ‘recuperation’ is not only related to the history of every [appropri-
ated] grandchild, but to the history of Argentina) (cit. M. Arias 2014).
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a vocal advocate of the group’s work
who had continued her husband’s dedication towards organisations
in the wider field of human rights activism, was quick to emphasise the
collective significance of this private familial reunion of grandmother
and grandson. Alongside a photo of her late husband and de Carlotto
in a tearful embrace, Kirchner wrote on Facebook and Twitter: ‘Hoy, la
Argentina es un país un poco más justo que ayer. Lo más importante [es]
el conocimiento de la Verdad, la persistencia de la Memoria y el triunfo
de la Justicia en serio. Memoria, Verdad y Justicia. Pilar fundante de esta
Argentina que estamos construyendo’ (Today, Argentina is a fairer coun-
try than it was yesterday. The most important things are knowledge of
the Truth, the persistence of Memory and the solemn triumph of Justice.
Memory, Truth and Justice. The founding pillars of the Argentina we
are building) (2014).6 Despite criticism from journalists who accused
Kirchner of using the event for her own political goals, contending that
‘la aparición se usó para ocultar dificultades económicas como el default’
(the discovery was used to conceal economic problems like the default)
(‘El nieto’ 2014), the President was persistent in stressing the immense
public importance of this deeply private act of reconciliation: ‘Guido’,
affirmed Kirchner, ‘es de todos los argentinos’ (Guido belongs to all
Argentines) (cit. ‘El mensaje’ 2014).
As mentioned previously, the election of Néstor Kirchner to the Casa
Rosada in 2003 marked a pivotal turning point in the way Argentine
society viewed the work of these human rights organisations. Discussed
at further length in Chap. 3 of this book, the significant official platform
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
afforded to these organisations as part of the Kirchnerist impetus towards

‘Memoria, Verdad y Justicia’ was accompanied by numerous public state-
ments that clearly and consistently communicated the government’s new
stance on the human rights violations of the country’s recent past. The
most notable of these was the immediate annulment of the country’s
laws of impunity in 2003, the re-opening of trials against those respon-
sible for the military regime’s atrocities one year later, and, perhaps most
evocatively for Argentine society, the transformation of ex-detention cen-
tres such as the ESMA (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada) into
centres for the preservation of cultural memory in 2005.7 Indeed, on the
28th anniversary of the military coup, the President publicly removed
the portraits of Videla and Reynaldo Bignone that hung in the ESMA
in an act of considerable symbolism. In the accompanying speech, given
in the presence of the Madres, Abuelas and HIJOS, Kirchner poignantly
asked for ‘perdón de parte del Estado por la vergüenza de haber callado
durante 20 años de democracia las atrocidades cometidas por los repre-
sores ilegales de la última dictadura militar’ (forgiveness on behalf of the
State for the shame of having concealed the atrocities committed by the
last military dictatorship’s illegal repressors over the last twenty years of
democracy) (cit. Pavón 2012: 415). In this way, the image of the State
promoted by Kirchner, himself a former Peronist Youth militant, there-
fore stood in direct contrast to both the violence of the military regime
and, significantly, to the unwillingness of successive democratic govern-
ments to prosecute the crimes of the Dirty War. As Alejandra Moreira
asserts, ‘[E]l discurso de los derechos del hombre se ha institucion-
alizado en la Argentina: ahora es política de Estado’ (The discourse of
human rights has been institutionalised in Argentina: it is now State pol-
icy) (2009: 69).
While apathy and ignorance among the general public towards events
surrounding the dictatorship had reached a high in the early 1990s,8 the
public confessions of the once-high-ranking navy officer Adolfo Scilingo
in Página/12, and the intense period of media coverage that ensued,9
provided a dynamic and potent backdrop for the creation of HIJOS.
Entering the public arena at a time far enough detached from the dic-
tatorship period that they could ‘afford to be more confrontational and
daring in their use of both techniques and of public space’ (Taylor 2002:
162), HIJOS began a new era of human rights activism in Argentina,
present on the public stage to a much greater, and more militant, extent.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
8 G. Maguire
While, as Ana Amado asserts in her seminal study of Argentine cinema,

the 1980s and early 1990s had been dominated by ‘la narrativa de las
“víctimas inocentes” para los muertos y para los desaparecidos’ (the nar-
rative of ‘innocent victims’ for the dead and the disappeared) (2009:
15), this generational reconfiguration of cultural memory saw the fig-
ure of the parent progressively repoliticised by this second generation.
Mora González Camosa and Luciana Sotelo contend that, ‘En contraste
con estas formas de representación del pasado, […] la figura de la “víc-
tima inocente” fue dejando paso a la “figura del militante” que, impul-
sado por una reivindicación no exenta de idealizaciones y mitificaciones,
comienza a constituirse como eje articulador de nuevas memorias sobre
esos años’ (In contrast with these forms of representing the past, […]
the figure of the ‘innocent victim’ made way for the ‘figure of the mili-
tant’ which, driven by a sense of vindication that was not exempt from
idealisation and myth, was gradually established as the discursive core of
any new memories of those years) (2011: 8). In the 2002 documentary
HIJOS: El alma en dos by Marcelo Cespedes and Carmen Guarini, an
interview with one child of the disappeared reflects this more pervasive
attitude towards the past:
Todos vivimos ese dilema: si [mi padre] me quería tanto, ¿por qué siguió
militando? ¿por qué decidió seguir si sabía que le iban a matar? Era ego-
ísta, no pensaba en mí, en mi mamá. […] Pero uno, cuando es chico, deci-
mos ‘necesito a mi mamá, a mi papá’, es que no entendés un montón de
cosas, pero después de un tiempo vas conociendo más qué pasó y la ver-
dad es que no era egoísmo porque justamente sí pensaban en nosotros y
en mucho más y en todo y siguieron adelante. Bueno, ninguno sabía, nin-
guno postulaba digamos que se les iban a matar a todos y que iba a pasar
lo que pasó. (2002)
[We all lived through this dilemma: if [my father] loved me so much, why
did he continue fighting? Why did he decide to keep going if he knew they
were going to kill him? He was selfish, he wasn’t thinking about me, about
my mum. [..] But when you’re small, you say: ‘I need my mum, I need my
dad’. You don’t understand lots of things, but after a while you start to
understand what happened more and more, and the truth is that it wasn’t
selfishness because they were, in fact, thinking of us and of much more:
they were thinking of everything and kept on fighting. I mean, no one
knew, no one thought that all of them would be killed or that what ended
up happening would happen.]
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
As the second generation reached an age at which the events of the

country’s past and the tragic, personal consequences for their own future
could be effectively processed and understood, historical memory con-
sequently became no longer a means of proving the existence of the
disappeared, as had been the case in legal trials during the immediate
aftermath of dictatorial repression, but a way of exploring the signifi-
cance of their personal connections to the past. ‘Memory emerged’, as
Druliolle writes, ‘along with truth and justice, on the agendas of human
rights organizations and other civil society actors as a goal in its own
right’ (2011: 15).
The group’s signature strategy of the escrache, a demonstration out-
side the home of an ex-repressor organised with the aim of broadcast-
ing the inhabitant’s crimes and involvement with the military dictatorship
to neighbours and colleagues, reflects one of the ‘more confrontational
and daring’ practices discussed by Taylor.10 While, during the years of
dictatorship, many strands of society had been repressively silenced from
denouncing the violent acts that were happening around them,11 HIJOS,
through their extremely public acts of denunciation, actively canvassed
broader society and thus ‘forced people to publicly define their posi-
tions’ (Kaiser 2002: 511).12 For David Benegas, this idiosyncratic type of
activism entailed a broader conceptual shift that redefined these personal
expositions of familial loss. ‘The escrache might be driven by trauma’, he
writes, ‘but it also itself drives a key characteristic of trauma to perform
a political intervention. These actions demand us to politicize trauma’
(2011: 20, emphasis in original). As Chaps. 2 and 3 will discuss at fur-
ther length, it is the politicisation of trauma that has taken place in the
domain of human rights which many of the children contained within
this book seek to challenge. In doing so, their work both draws atten-
tion to the subsumption of individual, personal narratives of familial loss
within a broader notion of collective victimhood and, at the same time,
points to this highly public form of activism as responsible for creating an
increasingly politicised and media-driven image of the hijo in contempo-
rary Argentine society. Interestingly, as a response to the increased public
attention towards the crimes of the dictatorship, the turn of the century
also saw these narratives of victimhood appropriated by senior figures
of the military, who, according to Valentina Salvi, ‘se vieron forzados a
tomar posición frente a los debates que la sociedad civil mantiene sobre
el pasado reciente’ (felt forced to take a position on the debates that
civil society was having about the recent past) (2009: 94). As Máximo
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
10 G. Maguire
Badaró likewise contends, in reference to a speech given in 2000 by

Ricardo Brinzoni, then a high-ranking figure in the army: ‘Al intentar
mostrar que los victimarios también habían sido víctimas, el jefe del ejér-
cito se nutría de la legitimidad social que había adquirido en el escenario
político y judicial argentino la figura de la “víctima” de los años setenta,
y la transformaba en un mecanismo de legitimación y relativización de
la acción de las fuerzas armadas’ (In trying to show that those respon-
sible had also been victims, the Army Commander fed off the societal
legitimacy that the figure of the ‘victim’ had acquired in the political and
judicial spheres in Argentina, transforming it into a mechanism of legiti-
misation and relativisation for the actions of the Armed Forces) (2012).
As The Politics of Postmemory will demonstrate, it is these public, politi-
cised discourses surrounding victimhood, as well as the close ties between
human rights organisations and the successive Kirchner administrations,
which many of the works included in this study seek, to varying degrees,
to complicate, undermine or reject.
In her article on cultural production and politics in the Kirchner era,
Verónica Garibotto writes: ‘Néstor and Cristina marked the beginning of
a new era […], the resurrection of politics and activism’ (2014: 116).
In this political context, as Garibotto continues, the distinctions that were
drawn by the Kirchners between the indultos13 and amnesty laws of previ-
ous governments and the restoration of activism during their own, suc-
ceeded in constructing a dominant standpoint among Argentine society:
‘Not adhering to Kirchnerismo’, writes Garibotto, ‘means contributing
to the creation of a de-politicised society like the one in the Menemist
era, where the neoliberal economy and the obsession for entering the
global market subsumed politics and activism’ (2014: 116). As this study
will argue, it is precisely these dominant, institutionalised notions of cul-
tural memory that are interrogated and contested by the cultural works
included in this study. In this sense, then, the desire to problematise
the prominence and position of the hijo within contemporary Argentina
reveals the broader political concerns of these texts: concerns which sur-
round generational and collective notions of victimhood and, significantly
for current studies of this generation, the postmemorial transmission of
trauma. In doing so, they aim, as Garibotto has argued, to render vis-
ible the ‘different notions of politics that compete within the fractured
ideological landscape of contemporary Argentina’ (Garibotto 2014: 127).
Against the backdrop of a state-supported institutionalisation of cultural
memory, therefore, this study will contend that these writers, directors
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
and artists utilise their work to intervene in national political debates and
expose the diverse political subjectivities of a generation which diverges
from the dominant figure of the hijo, both proposed by human rights
organisations and supported by the Kirchner governments.
As such, one of the central concerns of this study is how the pro-
cess of postmemorial identification is elaborated in the contemporary
Argentine context, both between and within distinct generations. In The
Generation of Postmemory, Hirsch privileges the intimate space of the
familial as the primary locus for the postmemorial transfer of cultural
memory, which, in turn, facilitates a subsequent affiliative structure of
identification that widens the experiential transferral of traumatic experi-
ence beyond the children and relatives of victims.14 She writes:
Postmemorial work […] strives to reactivate and reembody more distant

social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvest-
ing them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and
aesthetic expression. Thus less-directly affected participants can become
engaged in the generation of postmemory, which can then persist even
after all participants and even their familial descendants are gone. […]
Familial structures of mediation and representation facilitate the affiliative
acts of the postgeneration. The idiom of the family can become an acces-
sible lingua franca easing identification and projection, recognition and
misrecognition, across distance and difference. (2012: 33, 39, emphases in
original)
The Politics of Postmemory engages principally with these horizon-

tal, affiliative aspects of Hirsch’s conception of postmemory, and spe-
cifically with their development and elaboration in the contemporary
Argentine context by scholars such as Jordana Blejmar and Cecilia
Sosa. In particular, while Sosa has examined the works of this genera-
tion through the ‘expanded feelings of kinship that have been configured
in the wake of loss’ (2014: 2), and argued persuasively for a recogni-
tion of ‘the transmission of trauma beyond bloodline inscriptions’ (2),
this study will instead posit that it is precisely these expanded notions
of affiliative mourning which many of the post-dictatorship genera-
tion in Argentina seek to inhibit through their literature, film and vis-
ual art. Indeed, though Hirsch herself questions if ‘locating trauma in
the space of the family personalize[s] and individualize[s] it too much’
(2012: 39), and seeks to theorise modes of overcoming such ‘pitfalls of
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12 G. Maguire
familial transmission’ (35), The Politics of Postmemory claims that—in the

Argentine case—it is, conversely, only by elaborating their narratives in
the realm of the familial that these children may lay a personal claim on
a past that has been publicly co-opted and politicised by various social
and political actors in the arena of contemporary national and cultural
memory. Hirsch’s theories of postmemory have, of course, been used
in various discretely politicised contexts15 since her early writings on the
subject; here, however, it is the desire to respond to the dominant iden-
tity politics within contemporary Argentine society, and to inhibit such
aforementioned processes of affiliative transmission, that will be taken as
the paradigmatic political gesture of this post-dictatorship generation.
1.2 The Postmemory Generation

‘Why has the reference to postmemory become mandatory?’, questions
the author Mariana Eva Perez16 in her discussion of Argentina’s post-
dictatorship generation: ‘Is it simply a matter of “academic fashion” or
is there a more substantive explanation for the apparent popularity of
the term?’ (2013: 8). Since the considerable boom in memory stud-
ies in the humanities and social sciences during the 1980s and 1990s,
many contemporary societies have experienced what critics have referred
to as ‘a relentless fascination with memory and the past’ (Huyssen
1995: 254), a ‘public obsession with memory’ (Huyssen 2003: 17),
‘mémoire saturée’ (saturated memory) (Robin 2003), the ‘era of mem-
ory’ (Suleiman 2006: 8), a ‘surfeit of memory’ (Maier 1993: 136) and
even an ‘addiction to memory’ (Maier 1993: 141). Moreover, in their
seminal publication Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, Susannah
Radstone and Bill Schwarz declare their central aim to be an attempt
to ‘reveal the ways in which memory—and theories about memory—
have come to permeate all levels of our understanding of contemporary
experience’ (2010: 8). Within Argentina, and indeed Latin America as
a whole, the critical importance of cultural memory in the years fol-
lowing the region’s dictatorship periods has been well documented,17
and the proliferation of literature, film, theatre and visual art concerned
with issues of memory reflects such a considerable paradigmatic shift.18
However, the generational move towards the postmemorial narration
of traumatic and political experience among the second generation has,
problematically, tended to attract the same critical focus within cultural
memory studies, with a notable recourse, as previously mentioned, to
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
post-Holocaust theories of psychoanalysis and trauma (Felman and

Laub 1992; LaCapra 1998, 2001; Agamben 1999; Caruth 1996). For
Andreas Huyssen, this continued theoretical stress on trauma reflects a
broader, global impasse within work on cultural memory since the turn
of the century. He writes:
[T]oo much of contemporary memory discourse focuses on the personal

– on testimony, on memoir, subjectivity, traumatic memory – either in
poststructuralist psychoanalytic perspective or in attempts to shore up a
therapeutic popular sense of the authentic and experiential. […] The con-
cern with trauma radiated out from a multinational, ever more ubiquitous
Holocaust discourse. […] The privileging of trauma formed a thick dis-
cursive network with those other master-signifiers of the 1990s, the abject
and the uncanny, all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a
present repetitively haunted by the past. (2003: 8)
More specifically, in the Argentine context, Garibotto contends that

the application of trauma theory to recent cultural texts from the sec-
ond generation leads to a ‘loss of historicity’, which ‘obliterat[es] a larger
(political, historical) dimension, […] relegating filmmakers and char-
acters to the role of traumatized victims who passively suffer an unex-
pected occurrence’ (2017: 7). In particular, Garibotto argues that the
theoretical framework of trauma has become a problematic means of
approaching the work of this generation given that it ‘provides an inter-
pretative formula that treats all [texts] identically, extracting a common
meaning [and] entail[ing] an oversight of diachronic transformations in
the representation of history’ (2017: 7). In its place, she advocates for
an approach that avoids ‘becoming psychologizing, hyper-theoretical,
or fixated on trauma and mourning’ (Garibotto 2017: 11) and instead
understands how a text ‘materializes history and is inscribed in history’
(Garibotto 2017: 25). While The Politics of Postmemory acknowledges
the immense contributions of psychoanalytic theory to post-dictatorship
cultural criticism in Argentina, and indeed in Latin America more gen-
erally, the deployment of theories of postmemory within this book rel-
egates trauma to a secondary position of focus. Despite Perez’s claims
that when applied to the Argentine context ‘the conceptual framework of
postmemory conceals more than it reveals’ (Perez 2013: 10), as a result
of a normalising process that equalises individual acts in a collective
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
14 G. Maguire
victimhood, this study instead demonstrates that, by moving away from a

sole focus on trauma and towards a more rigorous historicisation of these
postmemorial narratives, the concept of postmemory may still be refash-
ioned as an appropriate, productive and potent framework with which to
approach the work of this post-dictatorship generation.
‘Generations’, writes Saul Friedländer, ‘are not merely categories of
time but also clusters of experience’ (Friedländer 2000: 8). While the
definition of ‘generation’ in the post-Holocaust context has received
much critical attention, most notably in the form of Susan Rubin
Suleiman’s ‘1.5 Generation’ (Suleiman 2002) and Henri Raczymow’s
generational ‘mémoire trouée’ (memory shot through with holes)
(1994), there have been fewer debates about the suitability of the term
within the Argentine context. Jordana Blejmar has pointed out in her
work on the children of the disappeared that ‘[u]sing the rather gen-
eral concept of “generation” to refer to the memory of the children of
the disappeared risks erasing the different experiences of the remember-
ing subjects, whose various ages determine distinct types of memories’
(2012: 35). Perez has also perceptively contended that ‘[t]here are other
variations among this wide group of victims, which depend on factors
such as social class; urban or rural location; family composition after dis-
appearance; extent of bodily contact with state violence; access to ther-
apies or other forms of working-though, and so on’ (2013: 10). The
writers, directors and visual artists contained within this study reflect the
broad ranges of ages, experiences and social backgrounds described by
Blejmar and Perez. For example, while Félix Bruzzone and Perez herself
(Chap. 3) were born during the dictatorship, the filmmakers Benjamín
Ávila and Paula Markovitch (Chap. 4) were already young children at
the time of their parents’ disappearances; similarly, just as the various
actors in Lola Arias’ play Mi vida después (Chap. 5) represent a range of
social classes and backgrounds, Perez’s novel directly—and comically—
also exposes certain inherent social hierarchies within contemporary
human rights organisations. As such, The Politics of Postmemory makes
a sustained effort to acknowledge and address these factors in the dis-
cussion of the individual works chosen for inclusion. Rather than a defi-
nite temporal demarcation, then, the use of the term ‘generation’ should
be understood as expansive, encompassing these disparate backgrounds
and experiences of political violence and looking towards the ‘cluster of
experience’ as the uniting factor between them. More precisely, the study
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
understands this affiliative ‘cluster of experience’ in terms of a shared

postmemorial approach to the past, in which three primary characteris-
tics, each discussed at further length below, are discernible: first, the aes-
thetics of fragmentation and imagination that pervade these narratives
of the past; second, the deeply affective connection to individual memo-
ries, which sets these recollections apart from other memories of the past
circulating in the collective sphere; finally, the use of postmemorial nar-
ratives as a means of gaining narrative, historical and, at times, political
agency.
As Hirsch writes in The Generation of Postmemory, ‘Postmemory
describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed
cultural or collective trauma bears to the experience of those who came
before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of the stories,
images, and behaviours among which they grew up. […] Postmemory’s
connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall, but by
imaginative investment, projection, and creation’ (Hirsch 2012: 5). As
can be seen from all of the primary works included in this book, the
mediated experience of political violence at ‘a generational remove’
(Hirsch 2012: 6) infuses their respective narratives, to varying degrees,
with a sense of fragmentation and reflexivity. As Ana Amado writes in La
imagen justa, discussing recent cinema from the second generation:
Sus poéticas testimoniales son episódicas, fragmentarias, a menudo vueltas

sobre sí mismas. […] Sus relatos participan, en todo caso, de un trabajo
de construcción de sentidos que no es mera re-construcción retórica ni
ideológica de clisés de aquella generación [la de sus padres], sino rescate,
relectura y apropiación de parte de quienes se sitúan ahora en el lugar del
heredero despojado, eligiendo intencionalmente los sentidos de algunas ori-
entaciones estéticas e ideológicas para reactualizarlas en el contexto político
en el que actúan en el presente. (2009: 161, my emphasis)
[Their poetic testimonies are episodic, fragmented, and at times self-reflex-

ive. […] Their narratives share, in any case, in a construction of meaning
that is not a mere rhetorical or ideological re-construction of clichés from
the generation of their parents; instead, they rescue, revise and appropri-
ate from their current position as divested heirs, intentionally selecting the
meaning of certain aesthetic and ideological orientations, so as to renew
them within the political context of the present.]
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16 G. Maguire
In a similar manner, the Argentine writer and critic Elsa Drucaroff

defends the aesthetic innovation and narrative fragmentation of these
texts as a necessary corollary of the difficult and distressing nature of the
past they are confronting: ‘Las nuevas generaciones son náufragas de un
barco que no condujeron, víctimas de timoneles que no pudieron ele-
gir ni dirigir. Prisioneros de una torre que presiden […] pero que los
sostiene, es la única tierra firme en la que puedan pararse’ (The new
generations are the shipwrecked survivors of a boat they did not steer;
victims of captains they could not choose nor command. Prisoners of a
tower that presides over them, […] but which also supports them: the
only solid ground in which they can stand) (2011: 35). As the second
chapter of this book maintains, it is precisely the ambivalence in the
post-dictatorship generation’s relationship with the past, characterised
at once by disconnection and by dependence, that releases their narra-
tives from any restrictive notion of testimonial responsibility and enables
a more creative approach to the representation of these intimate pasts.
For James E. Young in At Memory’s Edge, such a fragmented aesthetic
is thus not only justifiable but also directly representative of the second
generation’s contemporary experience. ‘As the survivors have testified
to their experiences of the Holocaust, their children and their children’s
children will now testify to their experiences of the Holocaust’, proposes
Young: ‘And what are their experiences of the Holocaust? Photographs,
films, histories, novels, poems, plays, survivors’ testimonies. It is neces-
sarily mediated experience, the afterlife of memory, represented in his-
tory’s after-images’ (2000: 3–4, emphasis in original).
In Tiempo pasado, Beatriz Sarlo criticises the use of postmemory in
the Argentine context, stating that, as a conceptual framework, it serves
to provide an unjustified theoretical validation for fundamentally subjec-
tive—and, in her opinion, dehistoricised—explorations of the past. For
Sarlo, these fragmented and personal narrations transform cultural mem-
ory into nothing more than ‘un almacén de banalidades legitimadas por
los nuevos derechos de la subjetividad’ (a storehouse of personal banali-
ties legitimised by the new rights of subjectivity) (Sarlo 2005: 130).
Furthermore, Sarlo also takes issue with the terminology of ‘postmem-
ory’ itself, positing that, for the second generation, ‘lo que los distingue
no es el carácter “post” de la actividad que realizan, sino la implicación
subjetiva en los hechos representados’ (what distinguishes them is not
the ‘post-ness’ of their work but the subjective implication in the facts
they represent) (130). Categorising this subjectivity as an intrinsic
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
aspect of all forms of memory, not just postmemory, Sarlo criticises

both Hirsch and James E. Young for their unnecessary and inaccurate
distinction: ‘Ambos coinciden en la fragmentariedad de la posmemoria
y consideran que es un rasgo diferencial, como si todo discurso sobre
el pasado no se definiera también por su radical incapacidad para recon-
struir un todo’ (Both coincide in the fragmented nature of postmemory
and consider this to be a distinct feature, as if all discourses surrounding
the past were not also defined by their foundational incapacity to recon-
struct a whole) (135). On the contrary, however, the Dutch sociologist
Ernst van Alphen, in his discussion of the intergenerational transmission
of memory among Holocaust survivors, elaborates on Hirsch’s use of
the term postmemory, celebrating its potential for designating a distinct
structure of memory transmission and clarifying the fundamental, semi-
otic distinction in her argument:
The normal trajectory of memory is fundamentally indexical. Memories,

partial, idealized, fragmented, or distorted as they can be, are traces of the
events of which they are the memories. There is continuity between the
event and its memory. And this continuity has an unambiguous direction:
the event is the beginning, the memory is the result. […] In the case of
the children of survivors, the indexical relationship that defines memory
has never existed. Their relationship to the past events is based on fun-
damentally different semiotic principles. It is only confusing to speak of
memory in this context, because memories are missing, by definition. That
does not mean that the generation of the children has no knowledge of
their family’s past. That knowledge is, however, the result of a process of
conveying, of combining historical knowledge and the memories of oth-
ers. And importantly for constructing, it is the result of a strong iden-
tification with (the past of) the parents, of projecting historical, familial
knowledge of a past one is disconnected from onto one’s life history.
(2006: 486)
Though Sarlo rightly contends that ‘lo vicario no es específico de la

posmemoria’ (the vicarious is not specific to postmemory) (Sarlo 2005:
130), it is this fundamentally distinct, detached, yet deeply affective,
relationship to the past proposed by van Alphen that The Politics of
Postmemory takes as the foundational generational distinction inherent
in the memories negotiated by this post-dictatorship generation. While
Hirsch herself agrees that ‘[c]ertainly, we do not have literal “memories”
of others’ experiences’, she does however maintain in The Generation of
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18 G. Maguire
Postmemory that ‘[p]ostmemory is not identical to memory: it is “post”;

but at the same time, […] it approximates memory in its affective force
and its psychic effects’ (Hirsch 2012: 31). One of the central aims of
this book, therefore, is to counter the criticism that these cultural texts
have received from critics like Sarlo by demonstrating how the subjectiv-
ity of their narratives is not to the detriment of our understanding of this
shared past but a foundational necessity from a generation whose pre-
rogative it is to explore such profoundly personal and affective memo-
ries from their position, as Amado writes, as ‘herederos despojados’. As
Carlos Gamerro has affirmed in an interview with some of the authors
whose works are examined here: ‘En contra del sentido común, que
nos dice que son los protagonistas, o los testigos, los más indicados para
recordar y contar la historia, [estos escritores] tienen pleno derecho a
hacer lo que quieren con ella, porque ella los hizo; la mudez no es prob-
lema para ellos, porque no están volviendo del campo de batalla: en él
nacieron’ (Contrary to common sense, which tells us that it is the pro-
tagonists, or the witnesses, that are best placed to remember and recount
a story, [these writers] are fully entitled to do what they want with such a
story, because it was this story that made them; silence is not a problem
for them because they are not returning from the battlefield: they were
born in it) (2010).
For Hirsch, the immense generational legacy that is to be negoti-
ated in the works of the second generation does indeed bear the poten-
tial to overshadow—and, at times, dominate—the lives of those who
come after. ‘To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be
dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s conscious-
ness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated,
by our ancestors’, writes Hirsch: ‘It is to be shaped, however indirectly,
by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction
and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their
effects still continue into the present. This is, I believe, the structure
of post-memory and the process of its generation’ (2012: 5). As previ-
ously discussed, while groups such as HIJOS see it as their generational
responsibility to uncover information surrounding their parents’ disap-
pearances and secure retribution for those implicated in the dictator-
ship’s repression, the authors, directors and visual artists discussed in
this book turn to their postmemorial narratives not as a means of objec-
tively reconstructing their parents’ past but of creatively interrogating
their own present position in relation to such commanding generational
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
legacies. In this way, The Politics of Postmemory broadens Hirsch’s defini-

tion of the structure of postmemory to account for the tense interplay
between trauma and politics in the Argentine context, recognising the
generational transferral of historical and narrative agency, and emphasis-
ing the evolving contemporary significance of these political remnants.
The desire to disrupt affiliative processes of postmemory is, therefore,
taken as a necessary and valid political gesture in the exploration of such
deeply affective personal and collective memories: a gesture which not
only exhibits a more creative relationship with the past, but which does
so as a means of recuperating something of the personal from institution-
alised and hegemonic public discourses of victimhood.
1.3 Los rubios and the Structure of the Book

During an interview in 2008, in reference to recent second-generation
texts in Argentina, the author Félix Bruzzone contended that ‘evidente-
mente Los rubios es una película que encara el problema desde una per-
spectiva completamente nueva […], y hay que pensar en cómo hablar de
eso de otra manera porque ya está Los rubios allí’ (Evidently, Los rubios
is a film that approaches the problem in an entirely new fashion […],
and one must think of how to talk about this in another way because
Los rubios is already there) (Bruzzone 2008). Released in 2003 and
described in a similar fashion by Gabriela Nouzeilles as ‘a new stage
within a progression of cinematic interventions on behalf of the victims
of state violence’ which ‘dared to significantly modify the ways in which
it is possible to talk about the past and its futures in post-dictatorial
Argentina’ (Nouzeilles 2005: 265–266), Albertina Carri’s documentary
has been a foundational landmark in the cultural production from the
children of the disappeared.19 The film explores the events surround-
ing the abduction of the director’s parents, both well-known Peronist
militants who were disappeared when Carri was only three years old.
Offering an iconoclastically ludic and formally experimental approach
towards the portrayal of 1970s militancy, the documentary delves into
an investigation of the past by mixing a series of contradictory and dis-
jointed interviews involving friends, family and ex-neighbours with ani-
mated sequences and self-referential scenes that lay the documentary
process bare. Indeed, with its combination of animated Playmobil epi-
sodes, animated reconstructions of her parents’ disappearance and sus-
tained reluctance to convey any coherence in the narration of the past,
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20 G. Maguire
Los rubios has been difficult to define generically, with critics using terms
such as ‘un reality show sobre la memoria’ (a reality show about mem-
ory) (Gorodischer cit. Moreno 2003), a ‘reflexive or performative doc-
umentary’ (Page 2009: 168), and a ‘documental posmoderno’ (Quílez
Esteve 2007: 72). As such, Carri’s documentary provides a produc-
tive starting point for a preliminary reflection on the works contained
within The Politics of Postmemory, representing an initial example of the
generic ambiguity and merging of fact with fiction that pervades all the
texts chosen for study. Moreover, the documentary also communicates a
desire to promote an image of the hijo which runs in parallel, and often
contradicts, the image propagated by human rights organisations and the
Krichner government. ‘Hay muchos hijos posibles’, affirms Bruzzone in
relation to the film’s divergent approach to narrating the past: ‘No sólo
el que reproduce la lucha política que también es [sólo] un tipo de hijo’
(There are many possible ways of being a child [of the disappeared], not
simply by replicating the political fight of the previous generation, which
is only one way of being a child) (Bruzzone 2008).
Shortly after Los rubios was released, the documentary received con-
siderable criticism within the Argentine cultural sphere, most notably,
perhaps, from the critics Beatriz Sarlo and Martín Kohan, who con-
demned what they considered to be an irreverent lack of historical objec-
tivity on Carri’s part and a refusal to confront the ideological reasons
behind her parents’ militancy. Deemed to be ‘un juego de poses y un
ensayo en levedad’ (a game of affectation and an essay in levity) (Kohan
2004: 30) and ‘un ejemplo casi demasiado pleno de la fuerte subjetivi-
dad de la posmemoria’ (an almost too-obvious example of the consider-
able subjectivity of postmemory) (Sarlo 2005: 153), the documentary’s
‘régimen de la descortesía’ (regimen of discourtesy) (Kohan 2004: 28)
was taken to be a direct dismissal of the political ideologies of the previ-
ous generation, characterised by a flippant reluctance to engage in any
extended or nostalgic examination of the Carris’ lives. ‘Quería impedir
que los diversos elementos como los testimonios, las fotos y las cartas
dejen esa sensación tranquilizadora, ese ya está, conozco a Roberto y a
Ana María y me voy a mi casa’, explains Carri: ‘Lo que yo planteo es pre-
cisamente que no los vamos a conocer, que no hay reconstrucción posi-
ble. Son inaprehensibles porque no están’ (I wanted to avoid the diverse
elements like testimonies, photos and letters offering a sense of reassur-
ance, a kind of closure, a ‘Now I know Roberto and Ana María and I’m
off home’. What I’m suggesting is precisely that we are not going to get
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
to know them, that no reconstruction is possible. They are out of our

reach because they are no longer here) (Moreno 2003).
Chapter 2 of this book, ‘The Copyright Generation’, focuses on ger-
mane issues of historical objectivity and generational irreverence in the
novels Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China (2011) by Ernesto Semán
and El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011) by Patricio
Pron. Though the narratives of both texts revolve around the deathbed
of a parent and point to problematic issues in the generational transmis-
sion of cultural memory, they do so in very different ways; while Semán’s
novel embarks on an explicitly fantastical exploration of his father’s life,
recreating scenes from his childhood and imagining conversations with
his father’s torturer on a fictitious and illusory island, Pron offers a more
indirect and oblique exploration of the creativity of the postmemorial
process as he pieces together the newspaper cuttings and articles that his
father had amassed during the last few weeks of his life. Through a more
extended recontextualisation of post-Holocaust discourses of cultural
memory within the post-dictatorship Argentine setting, Chap. 2 will
underscore the latent political impetus of this intergenerational transmis-
sion of memory. The chapter will also demonstrate how the fragmented
and mediated nature of these postmemorial narratives allow their authors
to move beyond an objectively unknowable, ‘disappeared’ past and con-
struct an identity anchored firmly in contemporary social, cultural and
political concerns. Just as Carri refuses to instil Los rubios with a coher-
ent and cohesive testimonial narrative, presenting first-hand memories as
often confused or contradictory, and relegating interviews with friends
and family to a secondary position on screen, these novels by Semán and
Pron exhibit a similarly disjointed and overtly subjective approach to the
reconstruction of the past. By exposing the impossibility of an objective
and comprehensive understanding of the previous generation’s expe-
rience, Soy un bravo piloto and El espíritu de mis padres underline the
potential of the postmemorial process, which, as Carri likewise asserts,
seeks not to present memory as a vehicle of testimonial legitimacy but to
‘exponer la memoria en su propio mecanismo’ (expose memory through
its own mechanisms).
Chapter 3, entitled ‘HIJOS de una misma historia’, will discuss the
parodic and often bleakly humorous portrayal of human rights organi-
sations in Félix Bruzzone’s novel Los topos (2008) and Mariana Eva
Perez’s published blog Diario de una Princesa Montonera (2012).
Both texts engage critically and explicitly with the social and cultural
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
22 G. Maguire
transformations under the Kirchner era, bringing into question recent

governmental efforts in the domain of human rights that, in their view,
have politicised the experience of the hijo and subsumed private, indi-
vidual narratives of loss within a public sense of collective victimhood.
While both texts, as in the case of Los rubios, have been subject to criti-
cism over their ostensible depoliticisation of the previous generation’s
militancy, this chapter argues that their ludic and subversive engagement
with cultural memory does not remove politics from the equation but
instead transfers the focus firmly to the present politics of the second gen-
eration’s contemporary experience of loss. As the central protagonist of
Bruzzone’s novel becomes increasingly alienated from HIJOS, and as
Perez’s semi-autobiographical Princesa Montonera intensifies her con-
demnation towards the continued efforts of the Madres and Abuelas,
both texts reveal a reluctance to allow their particular experiences of state
violence to be appropriated by the dominant narratives of grief and gen-
erational dependency which they consider to characterise Argentina’s
human rights collective. In a similar vein, Carri has also expressed her
unwillingness to express any affiliation with contemporary human rights
movements: ‘Cuando aparecen los HIJOS, no me interesan nada. Yo no
quiero ser hija toda la vida. Quiero ser otras cosas y en el medio tam-
bién soy hija’ (When HIJOS appeared, I wasn’t interested at all. I don’t
want to be a daughter all my life. I want to be other things, as well as
being a daughter) (cit. Moreno 2003). Similarly to Los rubios, then, these
texts by Bruzzone and Perez refuse to engage in any extended discus-
sion of their parents’ militancy, choosing instead to present highly sub-
jective, and at times fantastical, narratives which reflect in a very personal
manner the contemporary effects of such a turbulent past on their own
lives. Though Carri does not outrightly condemn—as is the case with
Bruzzone and Perez—the ongoing work of human rights organisations
in contemporary Argentina, she does nevertheless engage in a reinter-
pretation of the figure of the hijo, refusing to present an identity forged
solely from the political legacy of her parents or the identity politics of
contemporary human rights organisations, but instead proposing one
which is unavoidably intertwined with the many other facets of her iden-
tity that are at play in the present. There are, in the end for Los rubios,
just as for Bruzzone and Perez’s texts, many ways to be a child of the
disappeared.
Chapter 4 of this book, entitled ‘Hijos guerrilleros’, examines the
cinematic figure of the child in Benjamín Ávila’s Infancia clandestina
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
(2011) and Paula Markovitch’s El premio (2011). Both films recon-

struct the events surrounding the disappearance of the directors’ par-
ents through the eyes of their semi-autobiographical child selves, placing
the focus firmly on the domestic effects of left-wing militancy and, as a
result, effectively rehistoricising perspectives towards daily life in the
context of militancy. By complicating conventional conceptualisations
of the child protagonist as innocent, lacking in agency and incapable of
political commentary, these films not only problematise traditional per-
spectives towards childhood but also repoliticise the frequently mytholo-
gised figure of the adult militant, responsible, as these films suggest, not
only of well-planned acts of violence but also of putting the lives of their
dependents in extreme danger. Indeed, just as Carri condemns the tes-
timonies she gathers over the course of Los rubios for their tendency to
be expressed ‘de una manera en que mamá y papá se convierten en dos
seres excepcionales, lindos, inteligentes’ (in such a way that mum and
dad became two exceptional, beautiful, intelligent beings), and refuses to
present her own examination of the past as an account of ‘unos señores
malos y unos señores buenos’ (goodies and baddies), both Ávila and
Markovitch likewise evade such a Manichean approach to the represen-
tation of the past. This chapter will consider how the increased sense of
narrative agency afforded to the child protagonists of Infancia clandes-
tina and El premio generates a more nuanced generational critique of the
private effects of such militancy and, more broadly, represents a refusal to
accept any passively inherited marker of victimhood or generational sense
of dependency. Following Gonzalo Aguilar’s assertion that Los rubios
‘appears to get out of mourning, and it does so because it questions the
political project of the father and, by extension, of the armed organiza-
tions of the 1970s’ (2011: 158), this discussion will argue that the repo-
liticisation of the past through the child’s gaze in Infancia clandestina
and El premio allows the directors to transcend dominant emphases on
trauma and victimhood and, instead, affirm a secure sense of genera-
tional agency that undermines their pervasive societal position as second-
ary, dependent actors in their own familial histories.
‘Mi película planteaba una memoria fluctuante, hecha de documental,
de ficción y de animación’, explains Carri: ‘Porque, de hecho, no sólo
jamás acepté participar en películas testimoniales sino que no me siento
representada por ninguna. Siento que hablan de mí sin hablar de mí en
absoluto’ (My film proposes a fluctuating memory, made from docu-
mentary, from fiction and from animation. This is, in truth, because not
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
24 G. Maguire
only have I never agreed to participate in testimonial films but I’ve never
felt represented by a single one. I feel like they are speaking about me
but without really speaking about me) (Moreno 2003). The performa-
tive approach that Carri adopts in Los rubios and her disregard for the
formal conventions of the documentary genre are issues reflected in
the discussion contained within the fifth and final chapter of this book,
‘Performing Loss’. Examining contemporary works of photography and
theatre, namely from the photographers Lucila Quieto, Gabriela Bettini
and Inés Ulanovsky, and the dramaturge Lola Arias, the chapter main-
tains that the performative, present interactions they stage with inherited
objects from the previous generation (photographs, clothes, books, etc.)
reflect, in a fashion similar to Carri, an attempt to transcend reductive
notions of mourning and collective loss through a broader, more positive
and personal process of generational creativity. As images of the previ-
ous generation are reframed alongside their sons and daughters in the
photo-essays from Quieto and Bettini, and death scenes are imagina-
tively recreated on-stage by the children of disappeared militants in Mi
vida después (2009), these innovative performances not only expose the
affective inadequacy of documentary material in providing a meaning-
ful, comprehensive experience of the past, but they also consequently
gesture towards the potential of the postmemorial process to overcome
any reductive emphasis on the solely semiotic nature of the archive as
an indicator of past presence. In Los rubios, though Carri’s cumulative
assemblage of photographs, newspaper articles, books and interviews
over the course of the film may offer the illusion of an approximation to
an historical truth surrounding her parents’ disappearance, her assertion
that ‘con cualquier intento que haga de acercarme a la verdad yo voy
alejándome de ella’ (with every attempt to get closer to the truth, I only
get further away from it) points, in fact, to an opposite and discursively
unresolved conclusion. It is, instead, both for Carri and the artists con-
tained in Chap. 5, only through the renewed understanding of the past,
facilitated by these dynamic and material interactions between child and
document, that a private significance may be reinstated to their individ-
ual and distinct experiences of the disappeared past.
As this Introduction has shown, The Politics of Postmemory seeks
to recontextualise theories of postmemory within the contemporary
Argentine context, demonstrating how the subjective, fragmented and
innovative narrations of the country’s past by this post-dictatorship
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
generation contest the governmentally endorsed, media-driven and often

essentialised image of the hijo within the sphere of human rights. Rather
than simply depoliticised or subjectively insignificant accounts of indi-
vidual experiences of state violence, these texts actively expose the con-
tinued disappearance of distinct historical realities under homogenised,
dominant public discourses of victimhood and, consequently, provide
an alternative means of examining Argentina’s recent dictatorial past. In
this sense, The Politics of Postmemory challenges the work of those crit-
ics who see the aesthetic, formal and ideological choices of the hijos
addressed in this book as responsible for depoliticised narrations of the
dictatorial past; instead, the study argues that it is the continued and
pervasive critical emphasis on notions of trauma, victimhood and the fal-
libility of (post)memory which have led to reductively depoliticised inter-
pretations of their work. Therefore, by placing theories of postmemory
firmly within the Argentine context and, thus, exhibiting a heightened
sensitivity towards the intrinsically political elements of post-dictatorship
cultural memory, The Politics of Postmemory understands these cultural
works not as derivative or irreverent accounts of the country’s past, but
as legitimate and necessary elements of Argentina’s persistently contested
repertoire of cultural memory.
Notes
1. Hirsch first presented her theory of postmemory in Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative, Postmemory (1997). The present study will
focus on her more recent theoretical discussion of the concept contained
within The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After
the Holocaust (2012), which evolved from an earlier essay entitled, ‘The
Generation of Postmemory’ (2008).
2. Hirsch discusses, and indeed actively encourages, the application of the
postmemory framework in other contexts: ‘In fact, the process of inter-
generational transmission has become an important explanatory vehicle
and object of study in sites such as American slavery; the Vietnam War;
the Dirty War in Argentina and other dictatorships in Latin America.
[…] It is precisely this kind of resonance I was hoping for in developing
the idea of postmemory throughout my writing on this subject’ (2012:
18–19).
3. HIJOS was founded in 1995, in the organisation’s own words, ‘a partir
de la motivación por juntarnos, reivindicar la lucha de nuestros padres,
madres y sus compañeros, buscar a nuestros hermanos apropiados’
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
26 G. Maguire
(out of a motivation to get together, to vindicate the fight of our fathers,

mothers, and their comrades, to find our appropriated siblings), and with
the ultimate goal of ‘la cárcel común,perpetua y efectiva para todos los
genocidas de la última dictadura cívico-militar, sus cómplices, instigadores
y beneficiarios’ (the immediate life imprisonment of those who com-
mitted genocide during the last military dictatorship, as well as of their
accomplices, instigators and beneficiaries) (HIJOS 2008). See Druliolle
(2013) for a detailed historical study of the organisation.
4. According to the CONADEP report, 30% of desaparecidos were women,
10% of whom were pregnant at the time of their abduction (CONADEP
2006). As Lessa writes: ‘Children were also kidnapped along with parents
and detained pregnant women were kept alive until they gave birth, after
which newborns entered illegal adoption networks and were given to mil-
itary/police families, with an estimated 500 babies falling victims [sic] to
this practice’ (2013: 40). The figure of the niño apropiado has appeared
in film, literature and theatre in Argentina: for example, in Luis Puenzo’s
La historia oficial (1985), Elsa Osorio’s A veinte años, Luz (1998),
Martín Kohan’s Dos veces junio (2002), Félix Bruzzone’s 76 (2007) and
Los topos (2008), Lola Arias’ Mi vida después (2009) and Blanca Lema’s
Taper Ware (2009).
5. On 5 July 2012, Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison (in addition
to previous sentences) for the ‘apropiación sistemática’ (systematic appro-
priation) of disappeared children during his time in power between 1976
and 1981. At this time, Reynaldo Bignone was also sentenced to 15 years
in prison, along with nine other high-ranking military officers. For an
analysis of the processes and effects of appropriation, see Sabina Regueiro
(2010).
6. Néstor Kirchner was President of Argentina between May 2003 and
December 2007, when Cristina de Fernández Kirchner became
President. She remained in office until December 2015.
7. As an ‘Espacio para la Memoria y la Promoción de Defensa de los
Derechos Humanos’, the ex-ESMA now contains the Centro Cultural
de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, which has an active agenda of art/pho-
tography exhibitions, music events and plays related to the preservation
of memory. There are also organised tours around buildings in which
detainees were kept.
8. See Crenzel (2012) for a detailed account of apathy towards the Dirty
War among distinct age groups during the post-dictatorship period.
With reference to the mid-1990s, he writes: ‘Several opinion polls in late
1994 revealed that a surprising 70% of young people were unfamiliar
with Nunca más, knew little of the country’s recent history in general,
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
and knew nothing of the issue of the disappeared in particular’ (2012:

118). After Scilingo’s confessions, ‘[Nunca más] became popular among
readers, in particular young readers looking to learn about a past they
ignored. EUDEBA republished it in March, May, and August 1995,
printing 16,000 new copies in total, thus surpassing in only 5 months the
11,000 copies it had released from 1991 to 1994’ (119).
9. The interview was published subsequently as El vuelo (1996) by Horacio
Verbitsky.
10. The lunfardo word ‘escrache’ is etymologically linked to the word ‘scracè’,
meaning roughly ‘to expose’ (Taylor 2002: 162).
11. Taylor’s concept of ‘percepticide’ (2003: 122–124) will be discussed at
greater length in the third chapter of this book.
12. Kaiser continues: ‘Escraches have confronted civilian governments’ ongo-
ing refusal to deliver justice and reminded society that the book on the
past is still open. Escraches have trapped torturers and assassins by build-
ing metaphorical jails in neighborhoods throughout Argentina. Escraches,
thus, have been an effective communication strategy playing a key role in
challenging impunity and political amnesia in post-dictatorial Argentina’
(2002: 512).
13. The indultos mentioned here refer to a number of presidential pardons
decreed by Carlos Menem in 1989 and 1990, exonerating, among others,
Jorge Rafael Videla and Emilio Massera for crimes during the dictatorship,
and Leopoldo Galtieri for crimes committed during the Malvinas conflict.
These indultos were revoked by President Néstor Kirchner in 2003.
14. For an extended critique of notions of collective victimhood in Hirsch’s
early work on postmemory, see Radstone (2001).
15. Hirsch, for example, has linked discussions of postmemory with a critique
of identity politics related to issues of race and gender in the US Academy
(1997; 2012).
16. The author’s surname is written as ‘Perez’ throughout her publications,
academic engagements and online presence, rather than the conventional
Hispanic spelling of the surname, ‘Pérez’.
17. While any exhaustive list of critical texts concerned with memory in
Argentina is impossible, it is worth noting the following foundational
studies (in addition to those already mentioned): Daniel Balderston
(ed.), Ficción y política (1987); Judith Filc, Entre el parentesco y la
política (1997); Liria Evangelista, The Voices of the Survivors (1998);
Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present (1999); Sergio J. Guelerman (ed.),
Memorias en presente (2001); Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the
Struggles for Memory (2003); Ana Amado and Nora Domínguez (eds.),
Lazos de familia (2004); Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado (2005); Pilar
Calveiro, Política y/o violencia (2005); Cecilia Macón (ed.), Trabajos de
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
28 G. Maguire
la memoria (2006); Cecilia Vallina (ed.), Crítica del testimonio (2009);

Hugo Vezzetti, Sobre la violencia revolucionaria (2009); Claudia Feld and
Jessica Stites Mor (eds.), El pasado que miramos (2009).
18.
Likewise, while a complete list is impossible, the following are nota-
ble as landmark texts (again, in addition to those mentioned in this
Introduction): Ricardo Piglia, Respiración artificial (1980); Marta Traba,
Conversación al sur (1981); Luisa Valenzuela, Cola de lagartija (1983);
Tomás Eloy Martínez, La novela de Perón (1985); Fernando Solanas, Sur
(1988); Tununa Mercado, En estado de memoria (1990); Lita Stantic, Un
muro de silencio (1993); David Blaustein, Botín de guerra (1999); Luis
Gusmán, Ni muerto has perdido tu nombre (2002).
19.
Los rubios was, of course, not the first to deal with the dictatorship period
from the perspective of an hijo, but it did have the greatest impact on the
cultural sphere. Similar texts released before Los rubios include, among
others, Figli/Hijos (2001) by Marco Bechis, Los pasos perdidos (2001) by
Manane Rodríguez, and Cautiva (2003) by Gastón Birabén.
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gwm23@cam.ac.uk
CHAPTER 2
The Copyright Generation: Historical

Memory and the Children
of the Disappeared
In Formas de volver a casa, a novel by the Chilean author Alejandro

Zambra, the narrator speaks on behalf of a generation who were learn-
ing to ‘hablar, caminar, a doblar las servilletas en forma de barcos, de
aviones’ (talk, walk, fold napkins in the shape of boats and planes) at a
time when their parents were becoming increasingly involved in left-
wing militant activity (2011: 55–56). Moving between present-day Chile
and memories of his childhood under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–
1990), Zambra gestures towards the impact that the political choices of
the previous generation have had on any contemporary sense of collec-
tive cultural identity. In one episode of the novel, the author focuses on
the unresolved remnants of this problematic parent-child relationship,
drawing attention at once to the influential nature of the previous gen-
eration’s political and cultural legacies, and to the bearing that such an
imposing heritage exerts on both his own life and the lives of his con-
temporaries. He writes:
Hoy inventé este chiste:

Cuando grande voy a ser un personaje secundario, le dice un niño a
su padre.
Por qué.
Por qué qué.
Por qué quieres ser un personaje secundario.

gwm23@cam.ac.uk
34 G. Maguire
Porque la novela es tuya. (2011: 74)

[Today I made up this joke:
‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a secondary character’, a boy says
to his father.
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you want to be a secondary character?’
‘Because the novel is yours’]
The mix of humour, irony and childhood references with which

Zambra, and indeed many of his Argentine counterparts, negotiate this
difficult relationship points to a broader, more foundational issue for this
generation as a whole—namely, that of acknowledging the authority of
their parents’ political impetus in the present without being permanently
relegated to the dependent, secondary position as a child of the disap-
peared.
As these writers struggle with memories that precede their births
or with episodes from their childhood which they were too young to
remember, their textual attempts at exploring and understanding these
pasts are, therefore, marked indelibly not only by the political choices of
the previous generation but also, as Ana Amado contests, by ‘the faltering
and convoluted nature of the act of remembering’ (2009: 201). While
the gaps and fissures in the testimonial self are themselves testament to
the obscure and often unfamiliar period of childhood that is being rep-
resented, the persistent focus on contemporary political and social issues
that guides the re-elaboration of these memories further serves to under-
score the importance of the present in any process of memorial transmis-
sion. Though Paul Ricœur has written in Memory, History, Forgetting
that ‘[m]emory appears to be caught from the outset in the nets of a
transcendent authority, where the problems of credibility are held to be
already resolved’, this generation of authors, directors and artists instead
foreground the very instability of memory as a constituent element of
their ongoing concerns with both personal and collective identity (2004:
96). Far from imbuing the present with a sense of security—Ricœur’s
‘transcendent authority’—these works explicitly and actively situate their
narrative origins within the very fractures of memory. In doing so, they
emphasise the breakdown of familial narratives and, contrary to the work
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
2 THE COPYRIGHT GENERATION: HISTORICAL … 35
of a previous generation of Argentine authors and directors, explicitly

problematise the ‘already resolved’ issues of testimonial coherence.
Ernesto Semán’s Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China (2011) and
Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011)
both exhibit such a foregrounding of the subjective pitfalls and processes
of memory, doing so through the elaboration of personal and collective
recollections surrounding their parents’ militancy and eventual deaths.
Echoing Marianne Hirsch’s thoughts in The Generation of Postmemory,
these postmemorial narratives are indeed progressively ‘shaped more
and more by affect, need, and desire as time and distance attenuate the
links to authenticity and “truth”’ (2012: 48). Correspondingly, these
two semi-autobiographical novels point to memory not as a source of
any objective or official history, but to its inherent quality as a subjec-
tive, postponed and mediated construct. However, rather than simply
exposing its constructed nature through the postmemorial appropria-
tion of memory through fiction, these texts are also able to imbue their
narratives with a conflictive sense of present politics; a politics not only
of memory, but of generational identity, social inclusion and histori-
cal representation. Indeed, as these two authors negotiate personal and
appropriated memories from the position of the present, they exhibit to
varying degrees the dual aim of destabilising the dominant societal nar-
ratives of this turbulent period and of complicating the pervasive public
images of their parents that circulate in twenty first-century Argentina.
As such, their narratives enter into a personal exploration of this shared
past, which highlights and responds to the affective gaps that are to be
found between the lines of textbook history.
The subjective ‘truths’ that are therefore constructed through the cre-
ative exploration of the past, though incongruous with ideals of objective
historical fact, become important indicators of the continued political
effects of the country’s past in the present lives of these sons and daugh-
ters. Rather than dwelling on the narration of trauma or on the asser-
tion of a collective sense of inherited victimhood, however, these texts
avoid a universalising interpretation of this past and instead reinscribe
such experience actively and firmly within the political context of con-
temporary Argentina. By extracting a sense of personal significance from
this collective experience, then, the postmemorial process reappropriates
political agency and generates an identity position in the present through
the active exploration, and resolution, of events in the past. ‘El pasado
nunca deja de doler’, writes Zambra in Formas de volver, ‘pero podemos
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
36 G. Maguire
ayudarlo a encontrar un lugar distinto’ (The past never stops hurting,

but we can help it by finding it a different place) (2011: 113).
2.1 Part One: Soy un bravo piloto and the Limits

of Autofiction
Published in 2011, Ernesto Semán’s novel Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva

China provides an explicitly fictionalised exploration of his childhood
memories and is divided into three discrete narrative strands, all of which
infringe and impose upon one another in a reflection of the sporadic
and unpredictable nature of the process of remembering itself. First, in
the chapters entitled ‘La Ciudad’, we are presented with the main pro-
tagonist, Rubén Abdela, an Argentine-born geologist who now lives and
works in the US. Written in a more realist style than the other parallel
accounts, the majority of these chapters take place in his terminally ill
mother’s apartment and see the characters exchange, dispute and cor-
roborate their individual stories of the family’s past during the last few
weeks of her life. In the second, entirely fictional narrative thread, ‘El
Campo’, the reader becomes a witness to the torture and eventual mur-
der of Rubén’s father, Luis Abdela, a left-wing militant who was disap-
peared towards the end of the military dictatorship. As conversations are
imaginatively narrated between captive and capturer—the difficult char-
acter of El Capitán who, we are told, ‘no era de pensar sobre sus actos
pasados, ni de dramatizar, ni de celebrar’ (wasn’t used to reflecting on
past deeds, neither dramatising nor celebrating them) (2011: 43)—these
scenes allow the main protagonist to grasp a better understanding of the
political motivations and actions of his father, intimating the possibility
of an eventual literary catharsis. The third and final collection of chap-
ters, assembled under the heading of ‘La Isla’, form the more allegorical
aspects of the novel, and take place on an unnamed and timeless illu-
sory island where Rubén is able to view both his own childhood mem-
ories and the recollections of others projected via a USB drive. These
three narrative strands coalesce and gesture not only towards the inher-
ent problems in the intergenerational transmission of memory, but also
towards the inconsistencies and tensions that arise when these recollec-
tions are used within a generation to assert a collective sense of social
and political agency. By examining the latent political and generational
tensions in the novel, this chapter will highlight how the subjective
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
modifications of what is being remembered allows Semán to move

beyond an objectively unknowable past and look towards a future that is
both open to, and shaped by, his contemporaries.
‘Ruby, esto que estás viendo acá es tu pasado, pero no tu historia. En
el pasado no hay lugar para tu historia’, explains Rubén’s love interest at
the end of Soy un bravo piloto, as his time on the imaginary island draws
to a close: ‘Tu historia es lo que hagas con eso, es tu presente’ (Ruby, what
you’re seeing here is your past, but it’s not your history. There isn’t room
for your history in the past. Your history is whatever you do with it, it’s
your present) (2011: 274, my emphasis). Coming to terms with the deeply
personal and often highly distressing memories he witnesses in the chapters
entitled ‘La Isla’, Semán’s central protagonist addresses many of the issues
concerning memory and history discussed in the Introduction to this book,
both problematising the act of memory transfer itself and drawing particu-
lar attention to the societal position of the children of the disappeared: a
generation, as the novel ultimately contends, tasked with negotiating a his-
tory that is at once unfamiliar, yet continues to deeply and irreversibly affect
their own lives in the present. The oneiric projections of his father’s death
and the preceding fictitious conversations between victim and torturer in
the parallel narrative strand, ‘El Campo’, reveal the troubling and endur-
ing consequences of this past on any present sense of identity and, at the
same time, expose the difficulty the protagonist experiences when caught
between official versions of Argentina’s past and his own desire to address
the gaps in this history that have been left resoundingly unaccounted for.
As the historian Keith Jenkins asserts in Rethinking History, while the past
is irrecoverable, it is history that is reformulated within the ideological and
discursive frameworks of the present, and which thus maintains the abil-
ity to recalibrate identity. ‘[T]he past and history are not stitched into each
other such that only one historical reading of the past is absolutely neces-
sary’, he writes: ‘they are ages and miles apart’ (2003: 7).
While Rubén quite literally jogs through the past in Soy un bravo
piloto,1 running through dream-like projections of his father’s tor-
ture interlaced with images from his own childhood, Semán uses the
Island not only to examine the act of remembering itself, but also to
draw significant attention to the broader inter- and intra-generational
transmission of memory, weaving the protagonist’s personal recollec-
tions—both genuine and invented—within his wider community. The
surreal and constantly shrinking Island which provides the imaginative
setting for the third narrative strand of the text has, by the end of the
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
38 G. Maguire
novel, ‘desaparecido casi por completo’ (almost completely disappeared)

(2011: 275), hinting at the possible resolution that may be achieved
through this creative act of postmemorial exploration. However, while
this may be superficially understood as an exhibition of closure, a suc-
cessful process of ‘working through’ in the LaCaprian sense of the term,
this chapter instead contends that such a facile interpretation obscures
the greater political tensions inherent in present issues over identity and
memory.2 Following Ana Elena Puga’s assertion in her study of memory
and allegory in post-dictatorship Argentina that, within such allegorical
constructions, ‘[C]haracters, objects, and situations refuse to be pinned
down to a single significance and resist easy comprehension’ (2008:
146), the Island will therefore be understood to function in part as an
abstract representation of the protagonist’s own encounter with his laby-
rinthine and constantly mutating personal history. The very difficulty the
protagonist encounters in comprehending its totality is, furthermore,
reflected in the memories he experiences themselves. By approaching
the use of fiction in this way, as both a space for coming to understand
the past and as an expression of collective agency in the present, Semán’s
narrative highlights how the subjective modifications of what is being
recalled allow him to assimilate an objectively unknowable past and look
towards a future that is accessible to his contemporaries and, crucially,
defined by their dialogic participation.
2.1.1 Projecting Memories

‘Pero el centro de la fantasía era una última y larga conversación entre
[yo y mi padre]’, writes Semán in the first few pages of the novel: ‘De
tanto haberlo imaginado, todo parecía un poco más normal, a su modo.
Salvo por el hecho de que el hombre colgado en el living de mi depar-
tamento, mi padre, el Camarada Luis Abdela, había muerto treinta años
atrás’ (But the core of the fantasy was a final, extended conversation
between me and my father. Having imagined it so many times, every-
thing seemed quite normal, just as it should be; except for the fact that
the man hung on the wall of my living room, my father, Comrade Luis
Abdela, had died thirty years before) (2011: 15). While the protagonist
here at once constructs an interlocutor and points to the sheer impos-
sibility of any such interaction, this imagined conversation between
father and son is indeed progressively realised in the pages of the
novel. Balanced between the three narrative strands, Rubén succeeds
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
in examining both his own memories and those of his remaining family
members’, rewriting his family’s history through the power of fiction and
endowing the memories he negotiates with an imaginative agency that
finally allows him to come to terms with the effects that his father’s polit-
ical legacy exerts on his present. The deliberate blurring of the bounda-
ries of fact and fiction, an intrinsic quality of the works of this generation
as a whole, is, therefore, not to be read as a deceitful strategy within
the realm of autobiography proper, but as ‘autofiction’; a literary genre
first identified in 1977 by the French author Serge Doubrovsky. In his
novel, Fils, Doubrovsky argues that autofiction’s capacity to undermine
the autobiographical pact between writer and reader, with its explicit
rather than subconscious fictionalisation, prevents the genre from fitting
neatly into the domain of autobiography. While autobiography proposes
a nominal pact between author, protagonist and narrator, narratives of
autofiction are engendered through the very collapse of this agree-
ment. ‘As opposed to autobiography, which is explanatory and unify-
ing, and which wants to grasp and unravel the threads of destiny’, wrote
Doubrovsky, ‘autofiction does not imagine life as a complete whole’ (cit.
Jones 2007: 260). This subsequent narrative gap between the author
and his or her textual self implies, therefore, as Elizabeth Houston Jones
affirms, that no straightforward correlation can be drawn between the
main character and the author in autofiction: ‘Rather than professing to
tell the truth as sincerely as possible, autofiction acknowledges the fal-
libility of memory and the impossibility of truthfully recounting a life
story’ (2007: 98).
In this sense, Semán’s novel exhibits a similar tendency towards the
manipulation of history and memory as other comparable post-Holo-
caust texts, such as W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and Eva Hoffman’s
After Such Knowledge (2004).3 Furthermore, as a second-genera-
tion work of autofiction produced by the child of Shoah victims, Art
Spiegelman’s well-known graphic novel Maus I (1991) also exhibits
similar strategies of childhood reference and generic as the artistic out-
put of Semán’s generation, employing self-reflexive narrative tactics that
openly expose the fallible and often fictitious character of memory itself.
Despite the differences that are to be noted when the political nature of
Argentine postmemory is taken into consideration (discussed at length
in the second part of this chapter), here both the generic ambiguity
and ostensible playfulness with historical subjectivity are common liter-
ary devices in both contexts. Nevertheless, while the differing levels of
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
40 G. Maguire
fictionalisation are, of course, instantly apparent, there is a similar focus

that guides the re-elaboration of these narratives—namely, that of the
family and the ongoing emphasis of contemporary repercussions of the
parents’ past decisions on the child. As Elisabeth El Refaie remarks in
reference to Maus, ‘[H]is biographical material is always presented
through the prism of Spiegelman’s fraught relationship with his father,
and there is a clear focus on how his parents’ suffering has impacted
upon the author himself’ (2012: 41). In Family Frames, Hirsch pre-
sents Maus as a foundational example of the postmemorial text, a story
‘dominated by memories that are not his own’ in which ‘the story of
the father’s testimony and the son’s attempt to transmit that testimony’
(1997: 26) allow for an exploration of the very mechanisms of memory
transmission itself.
In Soy un bravo piloto, however, this autobiographical pact is com-
plicated further by the inclusion of three separate narrative voices: the
first, in ‘La Ciudad’, is the most realist and is supposedly elaborated
directly from the author’s point of view, surrounded by his remaining
family members in his terminally ill mother’s apartment; the second, in
‘El Campo’, belongs to an omniscient narrator who creatively recounts
the interaction between the torturer, El Capitán, and his victim, Semán’s
father; and finally, the voice of Rubén emerges once more, but in the
deeply fictionalised setting of ‘La Isla’. These three narrative strands
develop independently—though with the figure of the father function-
ing as their common denominator—and gesture, to varying degrees,
towards the text’s ostensible position as autobiography and towards
the creative indicators that conversely assert its status as fiction. Indeed,
while Gérard Genette has branded such autofiction as nothing more
than ‘shameful autobiography’ (1993: 87), criticising its blatant dis-
respect of any truth value and irreverent dissemination of falsehoods,
critics such as Claire Boyle see this fictional playfulness precisely as the
genre’s defining strength. ‘[T]he innovation of autofiction is that it
involves not just an awareness, but a celebration of the fictionalisation
of the self in writing’, writes Boyle: ‘For Doubrovsky, the epistemologi-
cal limits on self-knowledge call for a form of self-writing that acknowl-
edges these limits, delivering a manifestly incomplete account, a cluster
of truth-nuggets that require assembling by the other who reads them’
(2007: 18).
In Soy un bravo piloto, as with many post-Holocaust texts from
the second generation, the additional obstacle of navigating the
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
intergenerational transmission of memory complicates the motivations

for such recourses to autofiction. When Rubén stumbles upon a photo
among his mother’s personal belongings, ‘la única imagen existente de
nuestra familia en pleno’ (the only remaining image of our family all
together), we read: ‘La foto que había sobrevivido a todo, incluidos
nosotros mismos. En el reverso, escrito en letra cursiva y firme y apurada,
con una lapicera negra, podía leerse: “Elías Semán, Susana Bodner, y sus
hijos Pablo y Ernesto. Villa General San Martín, Rosario, octubre de
1969”’ (The photo had survived everything, including us. On the back,
written with a black pen in firm, rushed italics, you could read: “Elías
Semán, Susana Bodner, and their children Pablo and Ernesto. Villa
General San Martín, Rosario, October 1969”) (2011: 185). This is the
only episode in the entire novel in which we are provided with the real
names of the whole family, including that of the author. In this case,
the photograph does not, as one might infer from Genette’s criticism,
act as an attempt to imbue a deceptive façade of narrative or testimonial
authenticity into the fictive accounts contained in the rest of the book;
conversely, it allows Semán to ‘generar el efecto contrario: esa parte real
hacía mucho más fuerte la ficcionalización de todo el resto’ (generate the
opposite effect: this authentic detail made the fictionalisation in the rest
of the novel much stronger) (cit. Friera 2011). In a similar fashion to
Spiegelman’s Maus, where the inclusion of a fraudulent photograph of
the author’s father seeks not to conceal the text’s reliance on fiction but
rather to emphasise it, Semán also uses a purportedly ‘objective’ docu-
ment to undermine any testimonial coherence that one may attribute
to his narrative. ‘By deliberately presenting cartooning and photogra-
phy as equally unreliable forms of mediation’, writes El Refaie of Maus,
‘Spiegelman thus exposes the potentially fallacious nature of all accounts
of human history’ (2012: 172). Here, Semán both draws attention to
the levels of mediation and manipulation contained within all ostensibly
objective discourses of the past and, in turn, discloses the impossibility of
constructing a story solely from these restrictive sources. In this sense,
argues Semán, for both himself and his generation, there is no choice
but to resort to the realm of fiction. While this postmemorial creativ-
ity allows the author to fill the gaps between such surviving documen-
tary sources and enable a potential sense of catharsis, it is also precisely
what ‘relegates’ the narrative to the domain of autofiction: a domain, as
Doubrovsky explains, reserved for ‘the overlooked and the disregarded,
who have no right to history’ (cit. Boyle 2007: 18).
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
42 G. Maguire
Interestingly, whilst on the Island, Rubén has access to a USB drive

that contains his childhood memories, which he can view at will by pro-
jecting them onto screens. The inclusion of this metaphor highlights pre-
cisely what Semán, and indeed most of his generation, lack: any material
evidence of their childhood or affective reminders of their former paren-
tal relationships. While most children of the disappeared possess only a
few photos or newspaper cuttings as documentary evidence of their par-
ents’ lives, this USB drive allows the protagonist a much more accessible
and constructive relationship with his past, at times even allowing him
to play an active part in their (re-)projection. In a particularly significant
episode, Rubén recalls a seemingly trivial memory in which he is playing
in a park with a friend, while his father looks on from a bench nearby.
When his playmate steals a toy, his father refuses to make him return
it, explaining: ‘No, vení acá, Rubencito. Escuchame bien: los juguetes
no son tuyos. Los juguetes son’ (No, come here, Rubencito. Listen to
me: the toys aren’t yours. The toys are) (2011: 74, emphasis in orig-
inal). While this memory alone may not provide any striking inference
into why it has left such a lasting impression on the protagonist, a con-
nected memory provides the key to understanding its place in the novel.
As Rubén himself begins to grasp the connection, we read: ‘Leyendo el
guión, repasando los diálogos con la distancia de las décadas, todo es
tan obvio y no por eso más banal: la relación entre Luis Abdela, su hijo
Rubén y los juguetes está levemente desplazada, […] lo que Rubén rec-
lama no es la posesión de Los Juguetes sino su propia pertenencia a Luis’
(Reading the script, going through the conversations with decades of
hindsight, everything becomes obvious, though not any more banal for
that reason: the relationship between Luis Abdela, his son Rubén and
the toys is lightly displaced, […] what Rubén is complaining about is not
possession of The Toys but his own sense of belonging to Luis) (2011:
74). As the relationship between the childhood episode and its affective
significance is explicitly disclosed, it becomes clear that the incident with
the toy not only uncovers the protagonist’s lack of parental attachment,
but also metaphorically parallels the nature of the memories he is wit-
nessing. Just like the toy, the memories of Rubén’s father that are being
displayed from the USB drive are not the private property of any one
individual: they simply are.
In the previously mentioned interview with Página/12, shortly fol-
lowing the publication of Soy un bravo piloto, Semán comments on this
idea of ownership and contends that the novel’s purpose is precisely
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
not to provide a factually definitive version of his past, validated by his

position as the child of Luis Abdela, but to offer a possible alternative
to dominant historical narratives and to create ‘un collage de distintos
recuerdos y distintas memorias’ (a collage of different recollections and
memories) (cit. Friera 2011). He expands:
A diferencia de otros textos con los que trabajo vinculados más a la histo-
ria, la ficción me permitía poner los recuerdos y las memorias en conexión
con otras memorias y experiencias distintas –en algunos casos opuestas–,
para reconstruir un pasado un poco más completo. Me da la impresión de
que hay una forma de pensar el pasado y la memoria como ‘la’ memoria
con mayúsculas, la memoria como la historia total; pero el esfuerzo del
personaje de la novela es tratar de entender que su historia y la que vivió
el país es la suma de todas las memorias, la suya y la de otros: las memorias
que le gustan y que no le gustan. (cit. Friera 2011)
[In contrast to other texts I work with that are linked more to history, fic-
tion allows me to connect recollections and memories with other memo-
ries and distinct experiences—which may sometimes conflict—in order to
piece together the past in a more complete way. I get the impression that
there is a way of thinking about the past and about memory as the mem-
ory, with a capital ‘M’, about memory as a complete story; but what the
character in the novel is trying to do is understand that his history and the
history of the country is the sum of all these memories, his and all the oth-
ers’: memories he likes and memories he dislikes.]
Criticising official discourses of memory that aim to control one’s view

of the past or impose regulations on certain generic boundaries, here
Semán argues against the alleged objectivity of history and in favour
of both the socialisation of memories and the entitlement to vocalise
his own subjective, imagined past. Indeed, as the protagonist objects
to Rudolf’s intentions towards the end of the novel to turn the Island
into a tourist attraction, perversely sponsored by Ford, his reasoning
reflects this refusal to let the cultural memory of the past be dominated
or ‘owned’ by a sole entity.4 ‘Cada uno cuenta su historia, cuenta lo que
pasó’, he affirms, reasserting what he considers to be his right to engage
creatively and personally with these memories: ‘La verdad ya la conozco.
Es mi vida, lo que hice yo’ (Everyone tells their own story, they explain
what happened […]. I know the truth. The truth is my life, everything
I’ve done) (2011: 265, 268).
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44 G. Maguire
2.1.2 The Copyright Generation

In At Memory’s Edge, James E. Young discusses the artistic production
of second-generation Holocaust survivors, pointing to an area of con-
tention surrounding the perceived irreverence and lack of authenticity in
their works. ‘No doubt’, he writes, ‘some will see such work as supremely
evasive, even self-indulgent art by a generation more absorbed in its own
vicarious experience of memory than by the survivor’s experiences of real
events’ (2000: 3). Anticipating criticism on both ethical and historical lev-
els, Young claims, following Hirsch, that the ‘hypermediated experience of
memory’ which originates from a ‘vicarious past’ is, nevertheless, a valid,
experiential testament of the ongoing consequences of the Holocaust:
unavoidable aspects of a generational memory which is intrinsically an
‘unfinished, ephemeral process’ (2000: 2). ‘Theirs’, he maintains, ‘is an
unabashed terrain of memory, not of history, but no less worthy of explo-
ration’ (2000: 3). This intragenerational tension is made manifestly clear
between characters in Soy un bravo piloto during a noteworthy exchange in
which Rubén’s mother lies on her deathbed and shares some of her own
recollections about her late husband’s involvement with 1970s militancy.
During this symbolic, final ‘bequeathing’ of memories, the protagonist’s
mother discusses an episode in which Rubén, as a baby, had fallen ill, and
reveals how the father’s political ideologies took precedence over the well-
being of his own family. ‘Que mi hijo se cure como un hijo de la villa’
(Let my child be treated like a child from the shantytowns) (2011: 107),
asserts the father, before the newly-born Rubén responds:
‘Pero los hijos de la villa no se curan, pelotudo. Se mueren, la reputísima

madre que te parió.’ […] La revolución se come a sus hijos, pero no así,
carajo. No a mí, que a mi humilde modo había sido un buen revolucion-
ario en las dieciséis semanas que llevaba en esta tierra. No a mí que soy tu
hijo, Luis […], eternamente huérfano e indeseado. (2011: 106–107)
[‘But children from the shantytowns don’t get treated, you idiot. They die,
you son of a bitch.’ […] The revolution eats its own children, but not this
time, damn it. Not me, who in my own modest way have been a good
revolutionary for the seventeen weeks that I have spent on this earth. Not
me; I’m your son, Luis […] your eternally orphaned and unwanted son.]
Through a postmemorial shift of possession, we see the mother’s

memories, of which Rubén was indeed a part but much too young to
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remember, appropriated by the protagonist as an adult and endowed

with a revealingly creative injection of significance. The surreal notion
of a speaking infant, though interestingly appearing in the least fictive
narrative strand of the novel, is neither acknowledged in the text nor
questioned by the other characters. Crucially, it is the father’s parental
carelessness towards his son’s health that takes priority and, importantly,
which is blamed for rendering such speech impossible, rather than the
irrationality of a fully conversant newborn: ‘¿O fue Rosa quien lo dijo?
O nadie. Lo habría dicho yo, si lo que me quedaba de no infectado me
hubiera alcanzado para ponerme en su camino’ (Or was it Rosa who said
it? Or nobody. I would have said it, if what was left of my infected self
could have managed to block his way) (2011: 107). Discussed at greater
length in Chap. 4 of this book, here Rubén’s forceful criticism of pater-
nal neglect by a parent who dedicated himself to militancy despite the
dangers and implications for his family points to his current feelings
towards his own position in this history: once again it is the present, and
not the past, which fuels these processes of postmemorial resignification.
In Tiempo pasado, Beatriz Sarlo discusses the nature of testimony
and postmemory in post-dictatorship Argentina, drawing attention to
the undisputed confidence she accuses society of having placed in indi-
vidual narratives of trauma. Highlighting the ‘subjective turn’ in recent
theoretical and cultural debates, responsible in her opinion for granting
an almost unquestioned legitimacy to first-person testimony, Sarlo bor-
rows the words of Susan Sontag to argue that post-dictatorship society
has come to assign ‘too much value to memory, not enough to think-
ing’ (2003: 115). Criticising Hirsch’s terminology for its theoretical val-
idation of this disrespect among the second generation, Sarlo seeks to
unmask postmemory as nothing more than an indulgent literary façade
that conceals an unwillingness to understand the cultural and politi-
cal specificities of the previous generation. Likewise, Vezzetti condemns
contemporary uses of memory and testimony in his critical work on
left-wing militancy, Sobre la violencia revolucionaria. Considering offi-
cial documented evidence of traumatic experiences to be more reliable
than the individual memories of such events, and placing further limi-
tations on the benefits that artistic production may yield in attempts at
understanding the past, he writes, ‘[H]ay que desconfiar de la memoria
y remitirse a las fuentes. No hay duda, la memoria testimonial, aún con
sus límites y sus amnesias parciales, es una gran herramienta de cono-
cimiento y comprensión, pero si se la controla mejor’ (We must be wary of
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
46 G. Maguire
memory, and go back to the sources. There is no doubt that testimonial

memory, even with its limitations and partial amnesia, is a useful tool of
knowledge and understanding, but only if it is better controlled) (2009:
83, my emphasis). In approaching these texts with such a restrictive view
towards their objectives, these critics fail in large part to comprehend
the evident shift in historical representation from one generation to the
next. For Semán, the recourse to fiction is not a frivolous display of the
lack of intent to understand his parents’ generation, but is, conversely, an
attempt to reveal both the subjective mechanisms of testimony itself and,
importantly, the layers of mediation that characterise official discourses
surrounding the era of 1970s militancy. In highlighting their position as
a generation which, through no fault of their own, have access to only
fragmentary and often contradictory information about their past, their
engagements with fiction are presented as a necessary means to reach a
fuller understanding of the impact their respective familial histories exert
on any sense of present identity.
In an ironic acknowledgement of such critical disapproval, the charac-
ter of Rudolf, the malevolent guardian of the novel’s imaginary Island,
urges Rubén and his contemporaries—euphemistically labelled as ‘los
que tienen pasado’ (those who have a past)—to be ‘esclavos del placer de
mirar hacia adelante’ (slaves to the pleasure of looking forward) (2011:
76); that is, to make a conscious and sustained effort to leave the past
as the past, and to focus on a future which refrains from critically assess-
ing the vestiges of their parents’ militancy. Unimpressed with Rubén’s
attempts to creatively interact and play a formative role in the memories
he observes on the Island, Rudolf condemns his endeavours to rewrite
history, confiscating the USB drive where his childhood memories are
stored and shouting, ‘Dame el USB. Dámelo, dámelo, dámelo, dámelo.
[…] La escena me la quedo yo. Del pasado, los trajes y las tragedias’
(Give me the USB. Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, give it to
me. […] I’m keeping the scene for myself; the past, the outfits and the
tragedies) (2011: 75–76). When Rubén refuses to be relegated to a pas-
sive spectator of his own past and attempts to retrieve the USB drive, the
Island’s caretaker angrily continues:
Y perdoname si me pongo a filosofar un poco, pero con ustedes el prob-

lema es que han perfeccionado al extremo el arte de hacer de la memo-
ria un instrumento de disciplinamiento social, haciendo manipulaciones
caprichosas de mi memoria, de lo que yo recuerdo, de lo que cada uno
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
recuerda, para aplanar el ahora y creerse que saben quién está o no a la

altura de las circunstancias, de las verdaderas necesidades, de las Demandas
Históricas.
[…]
¿Vos sabés que existe un copyright de lo que uno recuerda? Pero no de los
contenidos, sino de su sentido, del mundo entero que incluye ese recu-
erdo. ¿O lo puede usar cualquiera? (2011: 76)
[I’m sorry if I go off philosophising a bit, but the problem with you lot is
that you’ve absolutely perfected the art of making memory an instrument
of social discipline, with your whimsical manipulations of my memory, of
what I remember, of what everyone remembers, just so you can level out
the present and think you’re in a position to judge who was or wasn’t up
to the task of negotiating the circumstances, the necessities, the Demands
of History.
[…]
Didn’t you know there’s a copyright on what you remember? Not of what’s
remembered, but of what it means, of the whole world that each memory
involves. Or can anyone just use it?]
While the very use of the word copyright intimates the legal attempts to
control memory in Argentina’s post-dictatorship period, as outlined in
the Introduction to this book, Semán’s critique here unravels on a much
wider scale. Addressing what seems to be the entire second generation
by the use of ustedes, it is the apparent postmemorial irreverence towards
the past, criticised by both Sarlo and Vezzetti, with which Rudolf takes
issue in his heated critique. The rhetorical nature of the final question—
‘Or can anyone just use it?’—again raises the question of ownership
and suggests he believes that memory, like private property, should be
possessed and controlled by a single individual. Placing the discussion
firmly within the domain of intergenerational transfer by directing the
speech to Rubén and his contemporaries, Rudolf contrasts los conteni-
dos of memory, or rather the objective narratives of the past that remain
unchanged and unchangeable, with su sentido, which he claims the pro-
tagonist has appropriated for his own selfish and impudent aims. Rubén
is guilty, as Rudolf sees it, not only of unfairly judging his father’s politi-
cal choices, but also of doing so through the incompatible and discrimi-
natory lens of contemporary ethical and social standards. When Rubén
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48 G. Maguire
takes issue with his father’s exclusionary dedication to militancy and

resultant neglect towards his ill child, Rudolf continues his chastisement:
Discutir con los muertos siempre es reconfortante, no sólo porque no

responden, sino porque es un camino ya conocido. […] Pero discutir con
los desaparecidos es mejor aún […] porque los pobres tipos terminan por
ser una elite sodomizada por sus propios vasallos, que se apropian de la
memoria como arma de vejación. ¿Quién va a tener la estatura moral para
decir que no eran héroes, y víctimas? ¿Eh? ¿Quién? (2011: 76–77)
[Arguing with the dead is always comforting, not just because they can’t
respond, but because it’s a well-worn path. […] But arguing with the dis-
appeared is even better […] because those poor guys end up being an elite
that’s sodomised by their own vassals, who seize their memory as a weapon
of harassment. Who’s going to have the moral stature to say they weren’t
heroes, or weren’t victims? Huh? Who?]
Nevertheless, while the Island’s guardian specifically pinpoints the

dynamic interplay of present perspectives with the recalled past as the
origin of Rubén’s unjust criticism and arrogance, it is, conversely, pre-
cisely this double temporality which allows the protagonist to make sense
of the history in the course of the novel, facilitating a narrative which
fills the subjective gaps of his own past and produces an account that
is, at once, deeply personal yet also reflects the experiences of an entire
generation. As Pilar Calveiro asserts in Política y/o violencia, this process
of appropriation is one which is necessary for the past to remain active
and influential in the present: ‘[L]a memoria es un acto de recreación del
pasado desde la realidad del presente y el proyecto de futuro. Es desde
las urgencias actuales que se interroga el pasado, rememorándolo. […]
Se trata, en consecuencia, de un doble movimiento: recuperar la histori-
cidad de lo que se recuerda […] a la vez que revisitar el pasado como
algo cargado de sentido para el presente’ (Memory is an act of recreating
the past from the reality of the present and the prospects of the future.
It is from the urgencies of the present that the past is viewed, remem-
bered. […] As a consequence, this entails a double movement: recuper-
ating the historicity of what is being remembered […] at the same time
as revisiting the past as charged with meaning for the present) (2005:
1). While this double movement between understanding the past and
maintaining its relevance for the present may, at times, appear superfi-
cially to tend towards irreverence, Soy un bravo piloto instead argues for
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
its capacity as a generational mode of revitalising memories, interrogat-

ing the mechanisms of memory transfer, and, ultimately, reasserting their
significance from the position as children of the disappeared. As Gabriel
Gatti remarks in El detenido-desaparecido, speaking from his own experi-
ence as a child of disappeared parents: ‘[The children of the disappeared]
show a willingness to objectify their own identity, to mark it with the
signs of the special, to construct an account, a very generationally biased
account, bordering on the irreverent, sometimes verging on the parodic,
not toward the generation before them but toward themselves, toward
their own history, and, above all, toward the mechanisms that make
them and us’ (2014: 140).
2.1.3 An Identity Position

‘The past appears no longer to be written in granite but rather in water,’
stresses Aleida Assmann: ‘[N]ew constructions of it are periodically
arising and changing the course of politics and history. It is not safely
locked up in history books and stowed away in libraries, but continu-
ally reclaimed as an important resource for power and identity politics’
(2008: 57). Crucially, the postmemorial exploration of the protagonist’s
past in Soy un bravo piloto not only enables the novel to reach a coher-
ent resolution in its final pages, but also, and perhaps more importantly,
allows the protagonist to entwine himself within a web of recollections
that firmly places him as an active interlocutor in his own familial history
and as a constituent part of a much wider generation. Echoing Pron’s
assertions in El espíritu de mis padres, as we will see, it is only by explicitly
embracing the temporal and ideological disconnection that lies between
his own present and the era of his father’s militancy that the creative
process of postmemory may take place. As Rubén assimilates distinct
memories and processes his father’s political legacy, a process allegorically
illustrated by the ever-shrinking Island, it is precisely through this imagi-
native investment that he is ultimately able to understand his father’s
intentions and forgive him, realising in the last few pages of the novel
that ‘hasta ahora no había pensado en el dolor de [su] padre, así de sim-
ple’ (he hadn’t contemplated the pain his father must have felt until now,
it’s as simple as that) (2011: 272). He continues: ‘En lo terrible que
tiene que haber sido para él. Siempre lo supe, siempre estuvo ahí, claro,
pero para darme cuenta de cómo la pasé yo, del padre que yo no pude
tener. Nunca paré un segundo para ponerme en su lugar, para sentir el
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50 G. Maguire
dolor desgarrador que tiene que haber sido su partido’ (How terrible it
must have been for him. I always knew it, it was always there, of course,
but only from my perspective, about the father I was never able to have.
I never stopped for a second to put myself in his shoes, to feel the heart-
breaking pain that he must have felt) (2011: 272). Mirroring his father’s
actions earlier in the same chapter of the novel, when he forgives his tor-
turer, we see the possibility of this act of pardon finally allowing Rubén
to accept his father’s actions and the imposing cultural legacy he must
navigate as a child of the disappeared. ‘Mi perdón’, as Abdela declares
shortly before his (imagined) death, ‘es el futuro’ (My forgiveness is the
future) (2011: 269).
In The Generation of Postmemory, Hirsch highlights the distinction
between familial modes of transfer and this broader affiliative structure
of transmission, noting ‘the difference between an intergenerational ver-
tical identification of child and parent occurring within the family, and
the intra-generational horizontal identification that makes that child’s
position more broadly available to other contemporaries’ (2012: 36).
Evident in the various narrative strands of Soy un bravo piloto, and par-
ticularly through the characters of Raquel and Rubén’s brother, while
the protagonist may appropriate the memories of his mother through
a familial act of transfer, it is principally through the intragenerational
sharing of stories and affiliative negotiation of meaning that leads him
towards any sort of literary catharsis. ‘It is only when [memories] are
redeployed, in new texts and contexts, that they regain a capacity to
enable a postmemorial working through’, writes Hirsch: ‘The aesthetic
strategies of postmemory are specifically about such an attempted, and
yet an always postponed, repositioning and reintegration’ (2012: 122).
Rebutting criticism from those who call for a greater objectivity when
approaching historical memory, Assmann, in her article on the dynamic
interaction between memory and history, draws attention to the capac-
ity of these postmemories to create such a wider interrelated community
and to the subsequent possibility they possess of collectively coming to
terms with a shared past. She writes:
Autobiographical memories cannot be embodied by another person, but

they can be shared with others. Once they are verbalized in the form of
a narrative or represented by a visual image, the individual’s memories
become part of an intersubjective symbolic system and are, strictly speak-
ing, no longer a purely exclusive and unalienable property. By encoding
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
them in the common medium of language, they can be exchanged, shared,

corroborated, confirmed, corrected, disputed, and even appropriated.
(2008: 56)
However, in a similar fashion to Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres,

the political agency that must be considered when contemplating specifi-
cally Argentine notions of postmemory here entails a modification of any
horizontal identification among Semán and his contemporaries. While
the novel does indeed provide the author with a space to negotiate this
generational act of memory transfer, ostensibly pointing to the possibility
of an ideological resolution through the disappearance of the Island in
the text’s final few pages, there is nevertheless a sense of tension that runs
through its narrative. Characteristic of many of this second generation,
such an engagement with the past does not equate to an understand-
ing, assimilation and subsequent closure of the past, as may be intimated
by the metaphor of the vanishing Island; it is, rather, a realisation of the
need to explore the past which is proposed by Soy un bravo piloto before
dissipating. As a result, Semán’s past is not definitively sealed within the
pages of the novel, ‘worked through’ and conclusively understood, but
remains continually and actively important for any contemporary sense of
personal and collective identity. While Hirsch asserts that ‘[P]ostmemory
is not an identity position but a generational structure of transmission’
(2012: 35), her theory must here again be recast in light of the political
nature of these distinctly Argentine expressions of postmemory. As dis-
cussed in the Introduction, this is a generation whose attitudes towards
their disappeared parents have become part of a wider political arena as
a direct result of the ongoing work of human rights organisations and
governmental manoeuvres towards ‘Memoria, Verdad y Justicia’. As
such, their decidedly politicised nature in contemporary post-dictatorship
Argentina points to an understanding of the past which is quite differ-
ent to the contexts in which Hirsch and her contemporaries have written.
As this book will continue to argue, at the same time as the emphasis is
shifted from largely traumatic elements of postmemorial transfer, present
in much Holocaust writing for example, to a political critique of the pre-
vious generation, we do indeed witness the forging of an identity posi-
tion against the cultural backdrop of post-dictatorship Argentina.
In Soy un bravo piloto, the toy airplane that the protagonist’s father
brings back from a military training trip to China comes to symbolise not
only two of the text’s main themes, those of the author’s childhood and
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52 G. Maguire
his parents’ militancy, but also becomes in the course of the novel ‘una
especie de talismán que va recorriendo generaciones’ (a type of talisman
traversing generations) (cit. Friera 2011). Though the toy is quite liter-
ally inherited by the sons along with a few letters and a photograph, thus
representing a link between generations, a later episode on the Island
appropriates the symbol of the plane to refer to this intra-generational
impulse the author experiences towards the construction of a collec-
tive identity. As the protagonist’s view of the sky is filled with ‘avion-
etas’ (little planes)—revealingly the same diminutive as is used earlier in
the text when referring to the toy—carrying messages from people on
the Island, one of the phrases given particular attention by the protago-
nist reads: ‘¿Quién de nosotros escribirá el Harry Potter?’ (Which of us
will write our Harry Potter?) (2011: 86). While the previous mention
of airplanes in the novel as a reference to the military administration’s
vuelos de muerte is still present in the reader’s mind, here Semán adds
another layer of cultural meaning by way of the reference to Ricardo
Piglia’s 1980 novel, Respiración artificial. By replacing Piglia’s refer-
ence to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s foundational 1845 text Facundo
(‘¿Quién de nosotros escribirá el Facundo?’) with one to Harry Potter,
Semán not only imbues the appropriated phrase with a comical—and
almost sardonic—reference to his secondary societal position as a child
of the disappeared but also, more importantly, draws attention to a
contemporary generation in need of consolidation. It is through these
textual strategies of constructing a collective generational perspective
in the present, combined with the attempt to move beyond narratives
of direct victimhood and dependency on the previous generation, that
Semán seeks to transcend his position as solely a child of the disappeared.
The incorporation of the perpetrator in Soy un bravo piloto, for exam-
ple, gestures towards an innovative attitude in the representation of this
era of Argentine history: ‘Traté de desarrollar una empatía por ese otro
que te parece incomprensible’, stated Semán in an interview, referring
to El Capitán and the imagined conversations between torturer and vic-
tim, ‘pero ante quien necesitás saber por qué hizo lo que hizo, y sólo
en ese contexto podía imaginar el dolor del torturador. Sin establecer
ningún tipo de equivalencia moral sobre los lugares de cada uno, pero
sí buscando respuestas que fueran más allá del lugar del hijo’ (I tried to
develop a sense of empathy for this ‘other’ that seemed so incomprehen-
sible, but whom I needed to understand in order to comprehend why he
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
did what he did; only in this context was I able to imagine the pain of
the torturer. Without establishing any type of moral equivalency between
the two of them, of course, but, at the same time, looking for answers
beyond the position of being a child) (cit. Friera 2011).5 Avoiding any
ethical or moral judgement towards El Capitán and incorporating a
point of view that has thus far remained relatively unexplored in cultural
representations of the Dirty War, Soy un bravo piloto thus can be seen
as part of a new, heterogeneous generational approach to Argentina’s
recent past.6 Though, materially, the protagonist possesses just a few let-
ters and a single photograph from which to piece together the remnants
of his past, it is through the fictional re-enactment of his father’s fate
and the imaginative exploration of his own childhood memories that an
enhanced subjective understanding of this past is reached; a crucial and
foundational process not just for Semán, but for an entire generation
struggling with a fragmented and complex cultural history, inherited as
children of the disappeared.
2.1.4 Conclusion
In the closing pages of the novel, a discussion between Rubén and
Raquel encapsulates the novel’s position towards the problematic herit-
age of the father’s death. Presented as both the narrative impetus of Soy
un bravo piloto and as something that must be processed and understood
in order to allow any further progression to take place, Semán writes:
– ‘Pero yo también soy eso que queda atrás. Yo soy Abdela’.

– ‘Y tus hijos serán Abdela, como que hay un Dios. Pero tenés
que saber cuál es tu puerto, adónde vas a desembarcar con toda tu
Abdelez a cuestas. Si no vas a ser siempre el equipaje de algún otro
viaje’. (2011: 274)
[– ‘But I am what’s left behind. I am Abdela’
– ‘And your kids will be Abdela, sure as there’s a God above. But
you need to know which is your port of call, where to get off with all
the Abdela-ness that’s weighing you down. If not, you’ll always be
someone else’s baggage’.]
Echoing Maurice Halbwach’s celebrated assertion that ‘individual

memory is nevertheless a part or an aspect of group memory’ (1992:
53), Rubén’s attempts to overcome this inherited generational baggage
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
54 G. Maguire
are heavily informed by the participation and assistance of the other char-
acters of the novel. The first narrative strand of the novel, for example,
takes place almost entirely in his terminally ill mother’s apartment, while
all three characters join in collectively remembering certain blurry epi-
sodes from their past. Not only in ‘La Ciudad’, but also in the two par-
allel narratives, individual memory is presented not as a single rational
line of facts, but as the interpellation of many strands of thought which,
though often opposing and overlapping, are comprised of both personal
and collective memoirs and are, perhaps most importantly, dominated
by the primacy of present anxieties. In this way, Soy un bravo piloto thus
becomes a literary quest to find a way to acknowledge and surmount the
problematic past of the father’s disappearance and the societal restric-
tions placed on the cultural memory of the dictatorship, and to reflect on
the capacity of these memories to assert a contemporary sense of agency
through the creative power of fiction.
As the protagonist nears a new understanding of the memories and
episodes he is confronted with whilst on the Island, we read in the final
few pages of the novel that ‘cuando [él] baj[ó] a la playa para tratar de
ver hacia adentro de La Isla de nuevo, todo se había desvanecido. No
había nada, ni la habitación en la que habían estado hablando, ni la figura
de Abdela, ni Capitán, ni nada, sólo un fondo blanco. Levant[ó] la mirada.
[…] Lejos, en lo que podía ser un oasis, los únicos rastros de lo que
había sido La Isla’ (when he went down to the beach to have another
look at The Island, everything had vanished. There was nothing; nei-
ther the room in which they had been talking or the figure of Abdela, or
The Captain, nothing, only a blank space. He looked up. […] Far away,
in what could have been an oasis, there were the last few signs of what
had once been The Island) (2011: 275, my emphasis). The allegorical
journey that the protagonist undergoes in comprehending his past and
in assimilating the various disparate strands of information surround-
ing his father’s death thus provides the space for an ongoing reconcilia-
tion between child and disappeared parent. Crucially, this resolution also
authorises a recuperation of agency and a generational position that is
forged from the fondo blanco he finds in place of the Island. ‘No puedo
quedarme para siempre acá’, affirms the protagonist at the end of his
journey, ‘lo sabemos desde el principio’ (I can’t stay here forever, but
we’ve known that since the very beginning) (2011: 275).
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
2.2 Part Two: Bringing Memory Home: Historical

Memory and El espíritu de mis padres
‘Yo se lo entregué y entonces él comenzó a cortar las piezas en trozos
minúsculos y carentes de sentido’, writes the young narrator of Patricio
Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia, recalling a
childhood episode in which his father fails to be impressed by the com-
pletion of a simple children’s jigsaw: ‘No se detuvo hasta que hubo
cortado todas las piezas y cuando acabó me dijo: Ahora armalo, pero
yo nunca pude volver a hacerlo’ (I handed it to him and he started to
cut the pieces into tiny bits, void of any meaning. He didn’t stop until
he had cut up all the pieces and when he finished he said, ‘Now put it
back together’, but I was never able to do it again) (2011: 129). In a
novel which progressively constructs circular narratives and parallel plots,
this early episode provides a reflection for what is happening on a much
wider level in the text as a whole. As the young protagonist returns to
Argentina from Germany and embarks on a quest to understand the life
of his dying father, a final attempt to piece together the parts of his own
life which have thus far remained suppressed below a haze of medication
and illegal drugs, he swiftly becomes aware that the last few weeks of his
father’s life had been spent on a similar, parallel quest for information—
namely, the ‘misterioso caso’ (mysterious case) of Alberto Burdisso,
a murdered resident of El Trébol whose sister, Alicia, had been disap-
peared during the military dictatorship some thirty years before (2011:
58). Examining the files of newspaper cuttings and articles left behind by
his father and gradually becoming more engrossed in the case’s intrica-
cies and various loose threads, the protagonist is also drawn more deeply
into the parallel search to understand his father’s life by completing this
distinctly adult puzzle he has unintentionally inherited. ‘Esta vez’, how-
ever, he realises that the stakes have changed significantly from those of
his childhood: ‘las piezas eran móviles y debían ser recompuestas en un
tablero mayor que era la memoria y el mundo’ (This time the pieces were
moveable and had to be put together on larger table-top, which was
memory and the world) (2011: 129).
Both in Argentina and indeed on a much wider global scale, the
recent increase in historical fiction and the growing attraction towards
the subjectification of the past is symptomatic of what Andreas
Huyssen has flagged as contemporary society’s reorientation towards
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56 G. Maguire
a ‘hypertrophy of memory, not history’ (2003: 3). In Present Pasts,

Huyssen points to the particularity of the postmodern experience, in
which history, once an anchor for ‘the ever more transitory present of
modernity’ and a ‘guarantee [of] the relative stability of the past in its
pastness’ (2003: 1), has entered into a dialogic relationship with mem-
ory, the erstwhile faculty ‘for the poets and their visions of a golden age’
(2003: 2) that once had little or nothing to add to objective versions
of the past. While Western ideas of modernity increasingly realigned our
gaze to the potential of the future, Huyssen posits that contemporary
society has undergone a semantic shift, causing us now to look to the
past for a renewed sense of stability, labelling memory as both a ‘sig-
nificant symptom of our cultural present’ and a ‘cultural obsession of
monumental proportions across the globe’ (2003: 3, 16). The incur-
sion of memory politics into social and political discourse has indeed
raised many significant questions in the Argentine cultural sphere, not
only surrounding the subjective revisions of ‘official’ historiography, but
also concerning the authority and elaboration of testimonies which deal
with personal and traumatic experiences. Taking Pron’s El espíritu de mis
padres as the lens through which to address these critical debates, the
second part of this chapter will posit that, through a negotiation of both
personal and appropriated memories, Pron aims not only to destabilise
dominant narratives of Argentina’s turbulent past, but also to provide
answers for the affective gaps in the past and create a more comprehen-
sive version of his own familial history. Published in the same year as
Semán’s text and narrated in the first-person, the ‘subjective’ truths that
are constructed within the novel’s pages through the creative exploration
of his father’s legacy enable Pron to problematise the notion of second-
ary victimhood, and—in much the same way as Semán’s protagonist—
allow for the forging of a collective position in the present from which
to look imaginatively and critically towards the past. Moreover, while the
Holocaust has, as Dominick LaCapra points out, become the hermeneu-
tic and ethical model for current discussions surrounding the interrela-
tion of traumatic post-conflict memories and their historical contexts, the
limitations of applying such a model to the post-dictatorship context,
and specifically to Argentina’s second generation, will be given significant
consideration. By drawing attention to the mechanisms of memory trans-
fer and underlining the distinct aspects of Argentine postmemory, this
chapter will continue, as Susannah Radstone has recently advocated, to
‘Bring Memory Home’ (2012) to a firmly Argentine context.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
2.2.1 The Memory/History Debate

In El espíritu de mis padres, as the protagonist becomes gradually more
enveloped in his quest to understand his father’s motives for investi-
gating the Burdisso case, he finds himself in a local museum, listening
repeatedly to a documentary in which his father discusses his career as a
journalist, feeling at once ‘algo de orgullo y una muy fuerte decepción’
(a sense of both pride and very strong disappointment) (2011: 133).
As the gallery prepares to close and an employee turns off the projector
screen, we read: ‘Mi padre dejó inconclusa la frase que estaba diciendo y
yo traté de completarla pero no pude: donde estaba la cara de mi padre
comencé ver la mía, que se reflejaba en la pantalla negra con todas las
facciones reunidas en un gesto de dolor y tristeza que yo nunca antes
había visto’ (My father left the sentence unfinished, and I tried unsuc-
cessfully to finish it: where my father’s face had been, I began to see
my own, reflected on the black screen with all of its features brought
together in a gesture of pain and sadness that I had never seen before)
(2011: 134). The inability that the protagonist encounters in engaging
in any meaningful interaction with his father’s image, and the sudden
disappointment he feels from ‘la imposibilidad de imitarle o de ofrecerle
un logro que estuviera a la altura de los suyos’ (the impossibility of
offering him an achievement that matched his own), are countered in
the next few sentences (and during the very same night) by the decision
to pen the novel that his father ‘[siempre] le hubiera gustado escribir’
(had always wanted to write) (2011: 133, 135). Though the museum
provides the protagonist with a few previously unknown, peripheral
facts about his father’s life, it is far from being the full story that the son
desires. The symbolic denunciation of the limitations of the museum and
its failure to foster any meaningful connection between the protagonist
and his father is revealed, in the course of the novel, as the very driving
force behind its narration. The novel he intends to write, ‘[b]reve, hecha
de fragmentos, con huecos allí donde [su] padre no pudiera o no quisiera
recordar algo, hecha de simetrías […] y más triste que el día del padre
en un orfanato’ (short, composed of fragments, with gaps where [his]
father couldn’t or didn’t want to remember something, composed of
symmetries […] and sadder than Father’s Day at an orphanage) (2011:
135–136), is, therefore, an active intent to complete the gaps that have
been left unaccounted for in official versions of his father’s past, continu-
ing—and perhaps completing—the unfinished sentences that the muse-
um’s documentary left so abruptly truncated.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
58 G. Maguire
In Pensar entre épocas, Nicolás Casullo argues against the museumifi-

cation of the past, exposing the need for ‘una contramemoria que debe-
ría oponerse a las operatorias sobre el pasado como pulcra mostración,
como diseño mimético […] que nos conducen a conflictos ya enmude-
cidos, ya homogeneizados, ya reciclados por una política y una ideología
conciliadoras, y por ende incapacitados para abrirnos a lo que realmente
nos espera más allá de las explicaciones legitimadas’ (a countermemory
which resists explorations into the past that are considered neat, mimetic
designs […] and which lead us to conflicts that have already been
silenced, homogenised and recycled by conciliatory politics and ideolo-
gies, and which are therefore unable to let us comprehend what is really
to be found beyond legitimatised explanations) (2004: 77). In a similar
vein, the Chilean cultural theorist Nelly Richard warns against both the
decontextualisation of memory and the subsequent process that actively
distances ‘historical memory from the network of emotionality which
once made it tremble collectively’ (2004: 32). Describing memory as
‘an open process of reinterpretation of a past that unties and reties its
knots so that new events and understandings are possible’ (2004: 29),
she points to the continual tension between memory and history, and
celebrates the resultant friction as a source of creative potential for the
present. Indeed, in El espíritu de mis padres, while the protagonist’s tex-
tual attempts at piecing together aspects of his father’s legacy may add
very little to any official museum or textbook versions of history—what
Casullo refers to as ‘legitimized explanations’—they do, however, have
an important and creative role to play in the coherence of the protago-
nist’s present sense of identity. Assmann, in her discussion of the inter-
sections between history and testimony of the Holocaust, asserts that
‘the survivors as witnesses do not, as a rule, add to our knowledge of
factual history; their testimonies, in fact, have often proved inaccurate.
[…] This however does not invalidate them as a unique contribution to
our knowledge of the past’ (2006: 263). These personal explorations
into memory, often disregarded by historians as ‘an undisciplined activity
that troubles the clear waters of historiography’, and which often con-
tain contrasting and contradictory information, can, nevertheless, offer
a ‘unique contribution’ (2006: 263) to our understanding of a collec-
tive, shared past: that is, not as attempts to discern exactly what may have
happened, but as indications of the ongoing consequences and how they
continue to influence any personal notion of identity.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
‘The historian cannot be and should not be the guardian of memory’,

writes Saul Friedländer in his discussion of the generational aspects of
trauma inheritance, concluding in the same article that
The historian’s gaze is analytic, critical, attuned to complexity, and wary

about generalizations. But the historian should not avoid the precise defi-
nition of interpretive concepts and categories in a domain so wide open
to extraordinary flights of imagination or malicious denials in interpretive
endeavours. […] The victims’ voices radically widen the narrative span.
(2000: 13)
Closely echoing Assmann’s claims, for Friedländer, these ‘mythic memo-

ries’—as he labels them in an earlier article—do not obfuscate or detract
from the authenticity of history itself, but possess the potential to intro-
duce an extra dimension of coherence ‘within the overall representation
of this past without its becoming an “obstacle” to “rational historiogra-
phy”’ (1992: 53). In the novel’s epilogue, Pron openly gestures towards
the mediated nature of the incidents contained within the text’s pages,
and acknowledges that ‘[a]unque los hechos narrados en este libro son
principalmente verdaderos, algunos son producto de las necesidades del
relato de ficción, cuyas reglas son diferentes de las de géneros como el
testimonio y la autobiografía’ (while the events told in this book are
mostly true, some are the result of the demands of fiction, whose rules
are different from the rules of such genres as testimony or autobiogra-
phy) (2011: 198). He then adds: ‘[E]n este sentido me gustaría men-
cionar aquí lo que dijera en cierta ocasión el escritor español Antonio
Muñóz Molina, a modo de recordatorio y advertencia: «Una gota de fic-
ción tiñe todo de ficción»’ (For that reason, I would like to mention here
what the Spanish writer Antonio Muñóz Molina once said, as a reminder
and as a warning: “A drop of fiction taints everything as fictional”)
(2011: 198). While Pron actively endeavours to discover the aspects of
his father’s life that have hence remained lost behind the more dominant
modes of historical narrative, he openly admits to his intent to achieve
this task, much like Semán, through a subjective, imaginative process
which is neither bound by the laws of rational historiography nor runs
counter to its aims.
Though Pron openly highlights the mediated nature of his own writ-
ing, he does, moreover, also make certain gestures towards the fallible
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
60 G. Maguire
nature of officially accepted history itself, undermining the manner in

which subjective testimonies may be used in the construction of a public
historical discourse. Having examined a large number of the articles that
his father had amassed and having investigated the details surrounding
the death of Alberto Burdisso, the protagonist reads one further report
which leads him to a rather sardonic conclusion:
[N]o aportaba información complementaria pero sí datos ligeramente

diferentes: aquí Burdisso tiene sesenta y un años y no sesenta, Marcos
Brochero tiene treinta y dos años y no treinta y uno, Juan Huck tiene
sesenta y uno y no sesenta y tres, […] Burdisso se ha quebrado cinco cos-
tillas y no seis y los dos hombros en lugar de un hombro y un brazo, como
en la versión anterior. (2011: 117–118)
[The article did not contribute any additional information but did offer
slightly different facts: Here Burdisso is sixty-one and not sixty, Marcos
Brochero is thirty-two and not thirty-one, Juan Huck is sixty-one and not
sixty-three, […] Burdisso broke five ribs and not six and both shoulders
instead of a shoulder and an arm, as in the previous version.]
Though the newspaper articles and other sources may not—and, per-
haps, may never—correspond on many points of the incident, Pron
does however highlight their nature as ‘detalles menores’ (minor details)
(2011: 119) and emphasises the innocuous quality of the discrepan-
cies for the story as a whole—no matter how many bones were bro-
ken or the relative distance of the house from El Trébol, the story of
Alberto Burdisso still remains one of tragedy. For Pron, and indeed for
many of his contemporaries, as this book will show, the assertions of
memory have an important role to play in any discussion of the past,
even when they fall short of the objective accuracy of factual truth. In
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History,
Dori Laub recounts a story in which a group of professional historians
discredited a survivor’s story because she ‘incorrectly’ remembered the
number of chimneys that had been destroyed during an insurrection in
Auschwitz. ‘The woman was testifying’, justifies Laub, ‘not to the num-
ber of chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more
crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown
up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than
the fact of the occurrence. […] She testified to the breakage of a frame-
work. That was historical truth’ (1992: 60, my emphasis). The factual
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
inaccuracies and contrasting information presented in El espíritu de mis

padres, which reflect the gaps and disputes in any mediated process of
remembering, are not presented by Pron as attempts at advancing a
definitive version of his father’s quest, but merely as a complementary
way of approaching the situation as a whole. Moreover, paratextually, the
chapters of the novel themselves are labelled incorrectly, often omitting
or confusing numbers, pointing to the unavoidable gaps in the protago-
nist’s (hi)story that can never be filled by any one totalising narrative.
Reflected in the narration of the novel itself, with these narrative ellipses
and parallel plots, Pron clears a path for the ‘historical truth’ of his own
personal story of his father’s militancy to exist alongside historical narra-
tives of the same era.
2.2.2 Generational Transfer and Postmemory

Writing in the specific context of post-dictatorship Argentina and focus-
ing on generational acts of memory transfer, the sociologist Jelin dis-
cusses the inherent danger of overlooking the marginal aspects of
memory, these unverified, and indeed often unverifiable, mutating reten-
tions that form the basis of any act of recollection. ‘To be the bearer of
pain and memory after having been a victim or direct witness grants a
certain power and symbolic authority through the “monopoly” of the
meaning and contents of truth and memory’ (1995: 141), she remarks,
in reference to the critical debates that have characterised Argentina’s
post-dictatorship era. She then offers a warning: ‘This power can, in
turn, stifle the mechanisms of the intergenerational transfer of memory,
by the refusal to grant new generations the permission to reinterpret—in
their own ways and from their own historical circumstances—the mean-
ing of the experiences that are being transmitted’ (1995: 143). Richard,
too, underlines the importance of the ability to offer reinterpretations of
the past through the generational act of mnenomic transfer. In Cultural
Residues, she writes:
The remains of the disappeared – the remains of a disappeared past – must

first be uncovered (un-undercovered) and then assimilated: that is to
say, reinserted in a biographical and historical narrative that allows them
to be tested and placed alongside coexisting meanings. To release mem-
ories from a past that pain or blame have encrypted in a sealed tempo-
rality, various interpretations of history and memory must be liberated,
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62 G. Maguire
interpretations capable of accepting narrative conflicts and revealing, from

the multiple disparate fractions of contradictory temporalities, new versions
and rewritings of events which transfer the past to the unedited networks
of historical intelligibility. It does not entail, therefore, looking toward
the history of the dictatorship in order to record the contemplative image
of suffering and resistance from a present in which said image becomes
mythically embedded as memory, but rather to create fissures in the mean-
ings that history has rendered past and finite, to chip away at its unilateral
truths with the creases and folds of critical interrogation. (2004: 41–42)
For both Richard and Jelin, and indeed for Pron and his contemporaries,
it is only through a dynamic process of continual reinterpretation, and
the dialogic incorporation of distinct memories, that this shared past may
remain relevant for any sense of a new collective identity.
This reinterpretation, however, does therefore admittedly include
a creative aspect which is not strictly true, but which attests, as Laub
confirms, to a historical truth that transcends the official and accepted
modes of narrating this recent history. While discussing a newspaper
poll, which had been carried out to assess general public opinion over
the whereabouts of the then missing Albert Burdisso, the protagonist
writes:
Por cierto, si se suman los porcentajes mencionados anteriormente el

resultado es 99,99 por ciento. El 0,01 restante, que falta o solo está pre-
sente como una carencia en la estadística, parece ocupar el lugar del desa-
parecido; parece estar allí como aquello que no se puede decir, que no se
puede nombrar siquiera; en el lugar de todas las posibles explicaciones a
la desaparición que los redactores de la encuesta han omitido mencionar
–y que pueden mencionarse aquí brevemente, incluso aunque se sepa que
son improbables o falsas: ha ganado la lotería, ha decidido iniciar un viaje
y en este momento está en Francia o en Australia, ha sido abducido por
extraterrestres, etcétera– y que están allí para probar tan siquiera que la
realidad es absolutamente irreductible a una estadística. (2011: 72–73, my
emphasis)
[By the way, if the aforementioned percentages are added up the result
is 99.99 per cent. The remaining 0.01, which is missing or simply repre-
sents an error in the survey, seems to occupy the place of the disappeared
man: he is there as that which cannot be said, that which cannot even be
named. The writers of the survey left out some possible explanations for
the disappearance that we can briefly mention here, even though they’re
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
admittedly improbable—he won the lottery, he is in France or Australia, he

was abducted by aliens, et cetera—which prove that not even reality can be
absolutely reduced to a statistic.]
The creative investment—the 0.01 per cent remainder—that here breaks

free from the available official versions of history and which, through-
out the novel, allows the protagonist to construct an imaginative narra-
tive which facilitates an understanding of his father’s life, also points to
a much wider aspect of Pron’s generation as a whole. In The Generation
of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch argues that the disconnectedness of the
second generation from the traumatic events that have preceded them
does not prevent them from engaging with these memories, but enables
them to appropriate them affectively as postmemories and endow them
with a new agency for contemporary notions of the past. For Hirsch, the
addition of the prefix post does not imply that subsequent generations
are ‘beyond memory’, but that memories of events they did not experi-
ence or were too young to recall have, at a generational remove, been
‘transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute
memories in their own right’ (2012: 5). Indeed, while the criticism sur-
rounding the distinctiveness of postmemory and its relation to memory
proper have already been discussed in the Introduction to the book, here
it is this separate strand of Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, focusing on
the character of the process rather than its form, which is relevant for
the present discussion. Driving a wedge between first-person testimony
and the creativity of postmemory, Hirsch brands this imaginative invest-
ment as an emancipatory process that distances itself from official ver-
sions of the past, and as one that, importantly, does not run counter
to their aims. ‘Postmemory’s connection to the past’, writes Hirsch, ‘is
thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, pro-
jection, and creation. […] These events happened in the past, but their
effects continue into the present’ (2012: 5). In a society still experienc-
ing the economic and political fallout from the turbulent period of the
Dirty War and its neoliberal aftermath, these inventive aspects of post-
memory consequently allow second-generation survivors to appropriate
their parents’ stories and use them creatively to construct versions of the
past which have, essentially, a much stronger link with preoccupations of
the present.
In a particularly significant part of the novel’s narrative the protag-
onist addresses related questions of coherence and authenticity, as this
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64 G. Maguire
intergenerational tension is made manifestly clear. Discussing his decision

to pen his father’s novel despite a lack of familiarity with the entire story,
he writes:
[M]e dije que yo tenía los materiales para escribir un libro y que esos
materiales me habían sido dados por mi padre, que había creado para mí
una narración de la que yo iba a tener que ser autor y lector, y descubrir a
medida que la narrara […]. Qué hubiera pensado mi padre de que yo con-
tase su historia sin conocerla por completo, persiguiéndola en las historias
de otros como si yo fuera el coyote y él el correcaminos y yo tuviera que
resignarme a verle perderse en el horizonte dejando detrás de sí una nube
de polvo y a mí con un palmo de narices; qué hubiera pensado mi padre
de que yo contara su historia y la historia de todos nosotros sin conocer en
profundidad los hechos, con decenas de cabos sueltos que iba anudando
lentamente para construir un relato que avanzaba a trompicones y contra
todo lo que yo me había propuesto, pese a ser yo, indefectiblemente, su
autor. (2011: 144–145)
[I told myself that I had the material for a book and that this material had
been given to me by my father, who had created a narrative in which I
would have to be both the author and the reader, discovering as I nar-
rated. […] What would my father think of my telling his story without
understanding it completely, chasing after it in the stories of others as if
I were the coyote and he the roadrunner, and I had to resign myself to
watching him fade into the horizon, leaving behind a cloud of dust, the
wind taken out of my sails; what would my father think of my telling his
story—the story of all of us—without really knowing the facts, with doz-
ens of loose ends that I would knot up slowly to construct a narrative that
stumbled along contrary to everything I’d set out to do, in spite of my
being, inevitably, its author.]
By way of the reference to a children’s cartoon, a literary trope which

abounds in texts from the Argentine second generation, Pron problema-
tises the mnemonic process of generational transfer and, towards the end
of the novel, comes to a conclusion which both legitimises the act of
writing and highlights the necessity of such an endeavour.7 He declares,
in the concluding pages of the text: ‘A veces pienso también que quizá yo
no pueda nunca contar su historia, pero debo intentarlo de todas formas,
y también pienso que, aunque la historia tal como la conozco sea incor-
recta o falsa, su derecho a la existencia está garantizado por el hecho de
que también es mi historia. […] Que ellos [el padre y sus compañeros]
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
digan las palabras que sus hijos nunca hemos escuchado pero que necesi-
tamos desentrañar para que su legado no resulte incompleto’ (Sometimes
I also think that perhaps I can never tell this story but I should try any-
way, and I also think that even though the story as I know it may be
inaccurate or false, its right to exist is guaranteed by the fact that it is also
my story. […] [I]f that’s true, if I don’t know how to tell their story, I
should do it anyway so that [my father’s generation] feel compelled to
correct me in their own words, so that they say the words that as their
children we have never heard but that we need to unravel to complete
their legacy) (2011: 190–191). As Hirsch attests, the children of those
directly affected by collective trauma ‘inherit a horrific, unknown, and
unknowable past’ that needs to be narrated, shaped all the while by ‘the
child’s confusion and responsibility, by the desire to repair’ (2012: 34).
This act of reconstruction by means of fiction not only enables Pron to
come to terms with his father’s inherited legacy, but represents, through
the very nature of the past that is being remembered, both a requirement
and a prerogative for the author and his contemporaries.
2.2.3 Bringing Memory Home

Since the beginning of the aforementioned global expansion of inter-
est surrounding historical memory, theories of postmemory, testimony
and the communication of trauma have largely been elaborated, as has
already been discussed, through the historical context of the Holocaust,
providing a rich and remarkable body of literature which has been inval-
uable in post-dictatorship Argentine cultural studies. In Multidirectional
Memory, Michael Rothberg considers contemporary global applications
of the Holocaust and discusses how historically, politically and geo-
graphically discrete conflicts can nevertheless uncover similarities and
open up debates over the nature of trauma. ‘Memory’, he writes, ‘is not
afraid to traverse sacrosanct borders of ethnicity and era’ (2009: 17).
Huyssen, too, confirms memory’s capacity to bridge eras and contexts:
‘The global circulation at once decenters the event of the Holocaust and
certifies its use as a prism through which we may look at other instances
of genocide’ (2003: 25). It is, however, important not to overlook the
distinctions inherent in each individual context of memory politics, and,
more specifically for this study, for the historical and cultural specific-
ity of Argentina’s post-dictatorship society. In a recent article entitled,
‘Bringing Memory Home: Location, Theory, Hybridity’, Radstone
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66 G. Maguire
advocates the necessity of emphasising ‘identity and locatedness in the

face of trauma and loss’, underlining the importance of configuring ‘[h]
ow a politics of memory grounded in memory’s relations with specific-
ity, location and identity might be forged without denying the limits on
identification imposed by acknowledging these specificities’ (2012: 335,
emphasis in original). In a similar vein, the sociologists Cecilia Sosa and
Alejandra Serpente, writing in reference to Chilean and Argentine sec-
ond-generation artists, also stress the significance of anchoring ‘travelling
concepts in the global field of memory studies’ to particular historical
conflicts, thus exhibiting a heightened sensitivity to their ‘new contested
attires when they reach southern scenarios’ (2012: 160).
There are, indeed, significant pitfalls when reconciling the applica-
tion of memory theory—and particularly for this study, theories of post-
memory—with the generational particularities of a specifically Argentine
context. Both Hugo Vezzetti and Nicolás Casullo have argued against
the use of Holocaust (post)memory as the hermeneutic model for con-
temporary Argentine cultural studies.8 Though both critics refrain from
entering into discussion over the specific characteristics which separate
both regimes, Vezzetti does make reference to the ‘construcción propia-
mente política del programa dictatorial’ (strictly political construction of
the dictatorial regime) (2002: 61). These markedly political aspects of
the Argentine case of memory transfer are, indeed, a significant feature to
accentuate; while there are parallels to be drawn between the Holocaust
and the Dirty War as institutional apparatuses of repression, including
but not limited to structural and processual similarities9 and the con-
cealed nature of the victim’s fate, questions of political agency complicate
the Argentine case beyond the intelligible limits of Holocaust theory.10
The ‘moral imperative to remember’ (1993: 5), as posited by James
E. Young in his discussion of Holocaust memorialisation, The Texture
of Memory, takes on a noticeably different ethical spin when applied to
Argentina’s second generation and the actions of their parents. While the
persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany was based firmly on racial grounds,
the systematic disappearance of Argentine citizens during the military’s
administration was largely aimed at leftist militants who had taken the
active decision to risk their lives, and the wellbeing of their families, in
pursuit of political ideals.11 To deny the distinctly political nature of the
repression in discussions of the generational transfer of memory, or to
relegate it to secondary importance, would be to fail to understand the
complexities of the ‘locatedness and identity’ of the Argentine case.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
While Holocaust studies have, for the most part, been concerned
with the application of trauma theory to literary, cinematic and artistic
representations from second-generation survivors, contemporary explo-
rations into memory—and not just within Argentina—must call for a
more diverse theoretical lens. As Huyssen asserts in Present Pasts, ‘It has
been all too tempting to some to think of trauma as the hidden core of
all memory. […] But to collapse memory into trauma, I think, would
unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively
in terms of pain, suffering, and loss. It would deny human agency and
lock us into compulsive repetition. Memory, whether individual or gen-
erational, political or public, is always more than only the prison house of
the past’ (2003: 8). In Representing the Holocaust, LaCapra also critiques
the obsessive focus on trauma that has come to characterise postmodern
Holocaust studies and its application in other contexts, warning against
the ‘tendency to “trope” away from specificity and to evacuate history by
construing the caesura of the Holocaust as a total trauma that is un(re)
presentable and reduces everyone (victims, witnesses, perpetrators, revi-
sionists, those born later) to an ultimately homogenizing yet sublime
silence’ (1994: 97). While notions of trauma cannot, of course, be com-
pletely disregarded from analyses of the works of Pron and his contem-
poraries, to restrict our perception solely to the traumatic would be, as
Huyssen concludes, an insurmountable obstacle in ‘understand[ing] the
political layers of memory discourse in our time’ (2003: 9). Pron’s novel
points to a wider reticence on the part of the children of desaparecidos to
inherit the passive role of victim. As Huyssen has affirmed elsewhere on
this very point, ‘memory must not be victimhood’ (cit. Bardotti 2010).
Similarly, the French philosopher Alain Badiou has highlighted a con-
temporary tendency to transform suffering into a form of entertainment,
resulting in a ‘suffering’ or ‘spectacular body’, which is devoid of any
political thought. ‘It is necessary’, he instructs, ‘that the victim is testa-
ment to something other than himself’, to form a ‘creative body’ (2004:
28) which is re-inscribed with agency and the capacity for political action.
This re-inscription of the political into readings of the past can, for
example, be seen in the 2007 documentary M, by Nicolás Prividera.
From the perspective of a son of the disappeared, Prividera’s documen-
tary recounts the story of his mother’s involvement with the Montonero
movement during Videla’s dictatorship, opening the film with an epi-
graph from William Faulkner: ‘Su niñez estaba poblada de nombres,
su propio cuerpo era como un salón vacío lleno de ecos de sonoros
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68 G. Maguire
nombres derrotados. No era un ser, una persona. Era una comunidad’

(His childhood was populated by names, and his own body was like an
empty room, full of the echoes of resonant, defeated names) (2007).
Rather than presenting his mother as a victim of the military adminis-
tration’s repression, and then appropriating this traumatic label, the
director instead examines the memories surrounding her disappearance,
highlighting militancy as her own choice, and in this way transcends his
position as passive victim by both critically engaging with the dominant
historical narratives of the period and refocusing the emphasis towards
the contingent political and social difficulties of the present. As one critic
writes while discussing the documentary, such works from the second
generation ‘[e]stablecen fisuras en las narraciones establecidas, […] situ-
ando su práctica como derecho y a la vez como deber, para recuperar
lazos entre lo que es y lo que fue’ (establish fissures in established nar-
ratives, […] situating their work as both a right and a duty, in order to
recuperate a relationship between what is and what was) (2009: 52). No
longer an ‘empty room, full of echoes’, the director’s own voice, just like
Pron’s, becomes a legitimate political force in itself. In this way, many of
the children of disappeared militants may indeed overcome the restrictive
and repetitive nature of past trauma, creating narratives that both look to
the past and to the future, and enable a recuperation and appropriation
of generational agency through the lens of the present. It is, both forPron
and Prividera, primarily the political, and not the traumatic, which fuels
the transfer of these memories in their distinctly Argentine contexts.
2.2.4 Political Agency, Postmemory and Pron

While describing a family photograph, the protagonist of El espíritu de
mis padres gestures towards the one-sided nature of his present endeav-
our of rescuing his father’s memory. He writes:
En la fotografía, mi padre no me mira, no repara siquiera en que le estoy

mirando. […] Yo no sabía aún, sin embargo, que mi padre conocía el miedo
mucho mejor de lo que yo pensaba, que mi padre había vivido con él y había
luchado contra él y, como todos, había perdido esa batalla de una guerra
silenciosa que había sido la suya y la de toda su generación. (2011: 23)
[In the photograph, my father isn’t looking at me; he doesn’t even notice
that I am looking at him […] I didn’t yet know that my father knew fear
much better than I thought, that my father had lived with it and fought
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
against it and, like everyone, had lost that battle in a silent war that had
been his and his entire generation’s.]
Reminiscent of Gabriela Bettini’s photograph (Fig. 1.1) which was dis-

cussed in the Introduction to this book, Pron’s image of parental dis-
connection and misunderstanding cannot but be imbued with political
reference. While Bettini uses the Nunca más report in her photograph
as the metaphor for the legal and cultural upheavals in Argentine soci-
ety since her grandfather’s death, here Pron highlights the unfathomable
fear with which his father’s generation carried out their militant activi-
ties as a metonymic indicator of the generational (and political) chasm
that must be understood in order to be effectively processed. Richard
claims that it is these political residues, the ‘fragments of experience
that were no longer speakable in the language that survived the catas-
trophe of meaning’, which must be creatively reworked in order to re-
establish contemporary significance and underline that which has been
irrevocably discarded (2004: 5). Adding a further nuance to the con-
textual differences between Argentine and Holocaust postmemory, it
is against the backdrop of Argentina’s attempts at national reconcilia-
tion, which aimed, as outlined in the Introduction, to relegate the past
firmly to the past through official amnesties and laws of impunity, that
these ‘aesthetics of the discard’ are, as Jon Beasley-Murray states, ‘reel-
aborated and reworked, allusively and indirectly, to indicate the fissures
and lapses within the contemporary discourse of political consensus, eco-
nomic prosperity, and cultural homogeneity’ (2005: 127). Indeed, as
previously argued, the contemporary socio-political uses of memory and
justice under the Kirchner administrations heighten the need for specific-
ity when dealing with the recuperation of political agency and, in Pron’s
case, when offering a new—varied and polemical—understanding of
1970s left-wing militancy.
In contrast to earlier works by this generation, however, Pron makes
an explicit reference to his reticence to evaluate the justifications for his
parents’ militancy.12 Towards the end of the novel, he writes: ‘También
comprendí que tenía que escribir sobre él y que escribir sobre él iba a
consistir ya no tan solo en averiguar quién había sido él, sino también, y
sobre todo, cómo ser un detective del padre y reunir toda la información
disponible pero no juzgarlo y ceder esa información a un juez imparcial
que yo no conocía y tal vez no fuera a conocer nunca’ (I also understood
that I had to write about him and that writing about him was going to
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
70 G. Maguire
mean not only finding out who he had been, but also, and above all,
finding out how to write about one’s father, how to be a detective and
gather the information available but not judge him, and give all that
information to an impartial judge whom I didn’t know and perhaps
never would know) (2011: 184). There are, of course, reflecting the
generic and ideological ambiguities that lie at the very heart of this post-
dictatorship generation, many differing opinions towards the political
interventions of the previous generation. Here, it is important to note
that Pron’s parents were part of the non-militant Guardia de Hierro, an
organisation they left before it combined with the Montoneros. In an
interview with Página/12, Pron admits that while he personally takes
comfort in the fact his parents were not responsible for killing anyone,
the necessity to understand the present significance of their particular his-
torical moment is what forms the basis of his novel. He explains:
Los supuestos derrotados de la historia, la generación de mis padres,

introdujeron cambios sociológicos y políticos sin los cuales la sociedad
argentina sería inconcebible. Creo que era el momento de pensar si algo
del espíritu del proyecto político de mis padres era pertinente y merecía
ser rescatado. De hecho no es una novela acerca del pasado, no es una
novela destinada a glorificar la experiencia política de mis padres y de su
generación. Es una novela que tiene la finalidad de pensar cuánto de todo
aquello es pertinente y útil aquí y ahora. (Friera 2011)
[Those who were supposedly defeated, my parents’ generation, introduced

social and political changes without which Argentine society would be
unrecognizable. I believe it was time to think about whether something of
the spirit of their struggle was pertinent and worthy of being rescued. In
fact it is not so much a novel about the past, or a novel destined to glorify
the political experiences of my parents and their generation. The novel has
as its main aim a consideration of how much is pertinent and useful here
and now.]
El espíritu de mis padres is, for Pron, not only an exploration into the
contemporary value of his parents’ political actions, but also a reflection
on the very mechanisms of memory transfer that allow such an inherit-
ance to be processed.
The novel is not, therefore, a simple transferral of political thought
between generations, free from any moral imperative or ethical legacy.
The socio-historical contexts of the two generations provide significantly
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
different obstacles, and this act of transfer, although primarily driven by

the inheritance of political agency, is a creative one which nevertheless
appropriates elements of the past and reconditions them in accordance
with the exigencies of the present. It is through this process that paral-
lels may be drawn between eras and, as the protagonist suggests in the
course of the novel, that the reactivation of political heritage is enabled
despite the contemporary incongruity of his parents’ ideals:
Mi padre había comenzado a buscar a su amiga perdida y yo, sin quererlo,

había empezado también poco después a buscar mi padre y ése era un des-
tino argentino. Y me pregunté si todo aquello no era también una tarea
política, una de las pocas que podía tener relevancia para mi propia gen-
eración, que había creído en el proyecto liberal que arrojara a la miseria a
buena parte de los argentinos durante la década de 1990 y les había hecho
hablar un lenguaje incomprensible que debía ser subtitulado; una gener-
ación, digo, que había salido escaldada pero algunos de cuyos miembros
no podíamos olvidar. (2011: 184)
[My father had started to search for his lost friend and I, without mean-
ing to, had also started shortly afterward to search for my father. This was
our lot as Argentines. And I wondered whether this could also be a politi-
cal task, one of the few with relevance for my own generation, which had
believed in the liberal project that led a large proportion of the Argentine
people into poverty in the 1990s and made them speak an incomprehen-
sible language that had to be subtitled; a generation, as I was saying, that
had gotten burned, but some of us still couldn’t forget.]
By both responding to ‘ese legado y ese mandato’ (this legacy and man-
date) (2011: 168) passed down from the previous generation and ref-
erencing the economic and social continuities of his father’s era in the
present, the protagonist intertwines ideas of loss and defeat with their
‘lot as Argentines’. Despite the differences in their concepts of what
‘transformación social y la voluntad’ (social transformation and strug-
gle) (2011: 168) may entail, there is, as the protagonist comes to under-
stand, ‘algo en esa diferencia que era asimismo un punto de encuentro,
un hilo que atravesaba las épocas y nos unía a pesar de todo y era espan-
tosamente argentino: la sensación de estar unidos en la derrota, padres
e hijos’ (something in that difference that was also a meeting point, a
thread that went through the years and brought us together in spite
of everything and was horrifically Argentine: the feeling of parents and
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
72 G. Maguire
children being united in defeat) (2011: 39). While both father and
son are brought together in the face of political loss, this focus is a tes-
tament not only to how it is political agency which drives the act of
memory transfer and creates links between generations, but also to how
notions of the political are appropriated and transformed in the present,
endowed with new significance for both the second generation and con-
temporary Argentine society as a whole. It is at this point, as Assmann
contends, where ‘testimony acquires the quality of testament: an inter-
generational memory is transformed into a transgenerational memory’
(2006: 271).
2.2.5 Conclusion
While discussing his parents’ involvement in militancy and describ-
ing certain aspects of left-wing militant protocol, the protagonist of El
espíritu de mis padres centres on one ploy that was utilised during the
1970s as a means of survival if arrested. He writes:
Un minuto. Un minuto era una mentira, una cierta fábula que mi padre
y sus compañeros inventaban todo el tiempo por el caso de que los detu-
vieran; si el minuto era bueno, si era convincente, quizá no los mataran
de inmediato. Un minuto bueno, una buena historia, era simple y breve e
incluía detalles superfluos porque la vida está llena de ellos. Quien contara
su historia de principio a final estaba condenado, porque ese rasgo específ-
ico, la capacidad de contar una historia sin dubitaciones, que tan raramente
se encuentra entre las personas, era para quienes les perseguían una prueba
de la falsedad de la historia mucho más fácil de determinar que si la historia
tratara de extraterrestres o fueran cuentos de aparecidos. (2011: 169)
[A minute. A minute was a lie, a cover story that my father and his cow-
orkers were constantly inventing in case they were arrested; if the minute
was good, if it was convincing, maybe they wouldn’t be killed immediately.
A good minute, a good story, was simple and brief but included superflu-
ous details because life is full of them. Anyone who told his story from
beginning to end was doomed because the ability to speak without hesita-
tion—which is so rare in people—was, to their persecutors, much stronger
evidence of the story’s falseness than if it was about aliens or ghosts.]
This ‘minute’ does, of course, closely mirror the protagonist’s own ambi-
tions in writing the novel. Breaking free from the constraints of the
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
hegemonic public discourses surrounding 1970s militancy, Pron provides

a story which aims to advance a fuller understanding of the past, inject-
ing the narrative with a creativity that allows him to uncover the aspects
of his own past that had thus far remained both unknown and unknow-
able through available official accounts. Already struggling with memory
loss from years of taking both prescribed and illegal drugs, the protago-
nist finds, for example, that it is not through the obsessive and laborious
listings of the books of his parents’ bookshelves or ingredients in their
recipe books that the keys to understanding the past are provided; it is,
instead, the imaginative reworkings of personal and collective memories,
fuelled by the subjective force of postmemory, which allows him to reach
his conclusion.
The parallel quests to come to terms with his father’s heritage and the
unresolved case of Alberto Burdisso draw the protagonist deeper into a
search which questions the very mechanisms of the generational trans-
fer of memory, revealing both its inherent complexities and the poten-
tial catharsis it may come to facilitate. The specificity of the Argentine
case, with its emphasis on the political rather than the traumatic, allows
Pron to reactivate this inheritance in the present, shifting the focus to
contemporary concerns rather than, as Huyssen has written, ‘deny[ing]
human agency and lock[ing] us into compulsive repetition’ (2003: 8). It
is through this distinctly Argentine postmemorial process that the pro-
tagonist is able to note similarities between his generation and that of his
father, but, at the same time, also account for the political backdrop that
distinguishes them. Denying an inherited position as victim or a passive
and secondary role as a child of the disappeared, the protagonist refo-
cuses the emphasis on the present and both reveals the subjective mecha-
nisms of testimony itself and creatively exercises his right to account for
the fissures in his own past by means of a process which is posited as
entirely justifiable when the familial stories one inherits are fragmentary,
incomplete and objectively unknowable.
2.3 Conclusion: Postmemorial F(r)ictions

In ‘Postmemory, Postmemoir’, Leslie Morris defines the works of the
post-Holocaust generation as ‘all poised between fact and fiction; expe-
rience and imagination; the immediacy of lived, remembered experi-
ence and mediated, transmitted, imagined memory, the memory as it is
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
74 G. Maguire
handed down in image, text, voice. The postmemoir is inexact and limi-
nal and poetic and sudden […]—it is there as trace and as echo and also
as fact’ (2002: 291). Indeed, as this chapter has shown through the par-
allels that are to be drawn between the post-Holocaust and Argentine
second generations, the semi-autobiographical works from Pron and
Semán also point to memory not as the source of any objective or official
history, but to its inherent quality as a subjective, delayed and experien-
tial construct. While both novels exhibit a varying dependence on mem-
ories that are passed down from one generation to the next in the form
of photographs, letters and anecdotal information, there is, however, also
a significant reliance on both the creativity of fiction and on the appro-
priation and modification of these memories among and by the contem-
porary generation. The narrative core of each novel revolves around the
deathbed of a parent, as this affective material—the very substance of
postmemory, as Marianne Hirsch confirms—is corroborated, challenged
and shared between the remaining members of the family. By pointing
precisely to the problematic generational inheritance that characterises
such a transmission of cultural memory, the two novels posit a different
interpretation of testimony, with their central protagonists avoiding the
appropriation of the label of victim and using their families’ histories to
forge a position in the present from which they can look collectively and
critically towards the past.
As the protagonist of El espíritu de mis padres narrates his arrival at
Buenos Aires airport at the beginning of the novel, and recounts see-
ing a figure resembling the footballer Diego Maradona, the postmemo-
rial impetus of the novel is revealed. After imagining the stranger with
‘una mano enorme, que golpeaba un balón para convertir un gol en un
Mundial cualquiera’ (an enormous hand that hit the ball to score a goal
in whatever World Cup), we read:
Como quiera que sea, aquel encuentro, que ocurrió realmente y que, por
tanto, fue verdadero, puede leerse aquí sencillamente como una invención,
como algo falso. […] Fue verdadero pero no necesariamente verosímil.
[…] Yo pensaba que había venido de los oscuros bosques alemanes a la
llanura horizontal argentina para ver morir a mi padre y para despedirme
de él y prometerle –aunque yo no lo creyera en absoluto– que él y yo
íbamos a tener otra oportunidad, en algún otro sitio, para que cada uno de
nosotros averiguara quién era el otro y, quizá, por primera vez desde que
él se había convertido en padre y yo en hijo, por fin entendiéramos algo;
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
pero esto, siendo verdadero, no era en absoluto verosímil. (2011: 24–25,

26–27)
[Whatever happened, that encounter, which really happened and was
therefore true, could easily be read here as an invention, as something
false. […] It was real, but not necessarily realistic. […] I thought that I
had left the dark German forests to come to the flat plains of Argentina
to watch my father die and to say goodbye to him and to promise him—
even though I didn’t really believe it myself—that he and I would have
another opportunity, in some other place, for each of us to figure out who
the other one was, and that, for the first time since we had become father
and son, we would finally understand one another; but that, although it
was real, was not entirely realistic.]
While the protagonist’s explorations of his own childhood memories and

the recollections of his remaining family members may be openly incon-
sistent with the objective ‘truth’ of dominant historical narratives of the
era, they do, however, provide the author with an opportunity to dis-
cover the details of his father’s life that have thus far remained absent
from museum displays and official documents. This re-staging of the past
is, for both Pron and Semán, a task which is realised through a subjec-
tive, imaginative process of continual reinterpretation, one which is nei-
ther bound by the laws of rational historiography nor one which runs
counter to its goals. Through this act of reconstruction by fiction, the
authors are not only able to negotiate their fathers’ inherited legacies and
imbue them with contemporary importance, but they also present this
task as both a requirement and a prerogative for them and their contem-
poraries.
Nevertheless, the decidedly political nature of these Argentine expres-
sions of postmemory calls for a different approach to the application of
post-Holocaust theory. By reappropriating the political aspects of their
parents’ militancy and recasting them in light of contemporary social
concerns, discussed at length in the next chapter, these authors overcome
the restrictive and repetitive nature of the solely traumatic and, while
looking at once to the past and the future, avoid the adoption of the
label of victim. Indeed, the allegory of the Island in Soy un bravo piloto,
whose ‘forma y tamaño y peso cambiaban con el tiempo’ (shape and size
changed over time) and which ‘podía ser totalmente diferente de acu-
erdo a cada uno, en cada momento, a cómo la viera cada uno’ (could
appear totally different to everyone, at any moment, depending on how
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
76 G. Maguire
you viewed it) (2011: 83), not only reflects the mutating and transform-
ative nature of memory itself, but points additionally to an exploration of
the past that resists definitive explanations and instead appears as a con-
stant and dialogic process for the members of Semán’s generation. The
disappearance of the Island in the novel’s final few chapters does not rep-
resent the assimilation, mastery and subsequent closure of the past, but,
rather, the realisation of the fundamental need the author perceives in
understanding this past and recognising its significance for the present.
Despite the criticism the work of the second generation has attracted,
this act of appropriation does not surface in either El espíritu de mis
padres or Soy un bravo piloto as a frivolous display of the lack of intent to
understand the previous generation; it is, conversely, both an acknowl-
edgement of a history that remains a powerful, regenerative source for
contemporary notions of identity and an attempt to exercise the right to
account for the fissures in this past, ultimately constructing an experience
for an entire generation which functions, as Morris suggests, as ‘echo
and also as fact’ (2002: 291).
Notes
1. The protagonist jogs frequently throughout the novel and records his
routes, providing a metaphor for movement and direction, but also
reflecting the circularity that characterises the novel’s narrative.
2. Throughout his oeuvre on historical trauma and the Holocaust, LaCapra,
drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Freud, distinguishes between ‘act-
ing out’ and ‘working through’: the former as the repetition or revisiting
of an original trauma; the latter as the successful resolution of said trauma
(1994, 1998, 2001).
3. Although Hoffman’s text is a critical work on the post-Holocaust gen-
eration, it does indeed take much of its material from the author’s own
life as a child of Shoah victims and displays a similar attitude towards the
function of memory in historical narratives.
4. Discussing the Ford Company, Rudolf explains: ‘Imagínese algo más o
menos así: Los turistas llegan […]. Ahí mismo ponemos en uno de los
Falcon a dos o tres represores y un desaparecido, podemos hacerlo con
armas falsas, como sea. Atrás ponemos otro Falcon con represores, con
anteojos oscuros y toda la pelota, y atrás el resto de los Falcon con los
turistas, manejados por un represor en cada auto. En el viaje, los tipos
leen los folletos con toda la historia, el juicio a las juntas, todo’ (Imagine
something like this: Tourists arrive […]. Then we put two or three
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
repressors into a Falcon along with a desaparecido, with fake guns, what-
ever we want. Then we’ll put another Falcon behind them, with more
repressors, with blacked-out windows and everything else, then the rest
of the Falcons with the tourists behind that, all driven by a repressor.
During the trip, they’ll all read leaflets that detail the whole history, the
Trial of the Juntas, everything) (p. 265).
5. The inclusion of the military officer and torturer also occurs in other
fictional accounts of the Dirty War and its aftermath, namely Félix
Bruzzone’s Los topos (discussed in Chap. 3) and, briefly, in Benjamín
Ávila’s Infancia clandestina (discussed in Chap. 4).
6. Although very few texts have attempted to portray the relationship
between torturer and victim in post-dictatorship Argentina, it is worth
mentioning Luisa Valenzuela’s Cambio de armas (1982), Marta Traba’s
novel En cualquier lugar (1984), Eduardo Pavlovsky’s play Paso de dos
(1990) and Marco Bechis’s film Garage Olimpo (1999).
7. See, for example, references to The Invaders in Marcelo Figueras’
Kamchatka (2002), the recurring metaphor of Batman and Robin in
Félix Bruzzone’s Los topos (2008), or the animated Playmobil sequences
in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003).
8. See Vezzetti’s Pasado y presente (2002) and Casullo’s Pensar entre épocas
(2004).
9. See Feierstein (2011) for a detailed comparative study of the structural
organisation of both regimes.
10. As Diana Taylor asserts (among others), the complete elimination of the
body of the desaparecido results in an ‘interrupted mourning process’
(1997: 191) similar to that of Holocaust victim’s family, whereby any
acceptance of the victim’s death is postponed due to the lack of grave or
body.
11. While the persecution in Nazi Germany was largely racial, there were also,
of course, other political, sexual and ethnic elements to the regime’s dis-
crimination. As Daniel Feierstein remarks in his sociological comparison
of the Holocaust and Argentina’s Dirty War: ‘[P]olitical and ideological
affiliation [in Argentina] seems to form part of a consciously constructed
identity: political activists “choose” militancy; they accept the risks such
activism may bring, actively assuming their identity. […] The Nazis essen-
tialized Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other groups as being “subhu-
man” and a biological threat to the human species’ (2014: 33, 35).
12. For example, in Los rubios (2003), the actress playing Albertina Carri
questions: ‘Me cuesta entender la elección de mamá. ¿Por qué no se fue
del país? me pregunto una y otra vez: ¿Por qué me dejó en el mundo
de los vivos?’ (It’s hard for me to understand the choice my mum made.
Why didn’t she leave the country? I ask myself over and over again: Why
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
78 G. Maguire
did she leave me here in the land of the living?). In Papá Iván (2000),
directed by María Inés Roqué, the voiceover states: ‘Hubiese preferido
tener un padre vivo que un héroe muerto’ (I would have preferred to
have a living father than a dead hero). Connected issues of generational
criticism will be discussed at greater length in Chap. 4 of this book.
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Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 2000. At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary
Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Zambra, Alejandro. 2011. Formas de volver a casa. Barcelona: Editorial
Anagrama.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
CHAPTER 3
‘HIJOS de una misma historia’: Identity

Politics and Parody in the Kirchner Era
On the death of Néstor Kirchner in October 2010, numerous human

rights organisations from across Argentina joined in expressing their
collective grief and gestured towards a recurring metaphor in contem-
porary discourses surrounding recent national trauma. ‘Yesterday, we
lost a father. Another father’, wrote one such mourner, ‘but Cristina is
there, our mother, to keep on fighting, to keep on going’ (Dios 2010).
As suggested in the Introduction to this book, the prevailing paradigm
of the political family and the importance placed on these symbolic fil-
ial connections during the post-dictatorship era have undergone a
period of considerable cultural renegotiation during the Kirchners’ time
in the Casa Rosada. While at times, during the previous twenty years,
the various members of this constructed political family—Madres,
Abuelas, HIJOS—had assumed the primary role on the national stage,
Néstor, over the course of his incumbency, succeeded in ‘legitimiz[ing]
the Presidency as a valid interlocutor with sectors of popular move-
ments [and] human rights groups’, presenting himself as an ardent
advocate and potential father figure in their quest for justice and ret-
ribution (Petras and Veltmeyer 2009: 57). Having declared in his first
speech to the United Nations in 2003 that all Argentines were ‘los hijos
de las Madres y las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo’ (the sons and daugh-
ters of the Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) (cit.
Rodrígez 2003), the newly elected President maintained an exception-
ally public relationship with many of the organisations that had become
so emblematic of the country’s legislative and cultural struggles during

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82 G. Maguire
the democratic transition and in the years since. The decision to repeal
the contentious laws of Punto Final and Obediencia Debida in the same
year, combined with the controversial creation of new ‘espacios para la
memoria’ (spaces of memory) in sites such as the ex-detention centre
ESMA and the opening of trials against many high-ranking officers in
2004, were all clear-cut indications of the President’s promise to those
affected by state-sponsored violence that ‘[l]a defensa de los derechos
humanos ocupa[ría] un lugar central en la nueva agenda de la República
Argentina’ (the protection of human rights would occupy a central place
in the new agenda of the Argentine Republic) (cit. Rodríguez 2003).
As these symbolic familial ties became prevalent in political discourse
in the early 2000s, no longer ‘un relato secundario’ (of secondary sig-
nificance), as Nicolás Prividera attests, ‘sino casi oficial’ (but almost of
official importance), groups such as HIJOS swiftly utilised this newfound
governmental platform (cit. Wajszczuk 2010). While the organisation
has claimed that those who lost their parents in the Dirty War are ‘todos
hijos de una misma historia’ (all children of the same story) (HIJOS
2008), the writers, directors and visual artists included in this book have
however begun to question the hegemony of such politically charged
declarations of kinship. Reluctant to allow their own personal grief to be
subsumed within the communal activism of human rights organisations
and rejecting the presidentially endorsed image of the child as a politically
engaged militant, these young writers and directors have publicly begun
to question the constraints of such an essentialised identity position.
Their work has offered original—and often highly controversial—ways
to read both their own personal past and the painful recent history of
Argentina as a nation. In Surviving Forced Disappearance, the Uruguayan
sociologist Gabriel Gatti discusses the function of parody in their work,
and signposts the underlying political critique masked by such irreverent
and controversial attitudes towards contemporary political ideology:
Parody is not mockery; it is a mechanism on which reflective narratives are

built, reflective narratives regarding the ‘I’ and ‘We’, the ‘us’ and ‘Them’,
the ‘who am I’ and the ‘who are we’, which without renouncing the pow-
erful supports of the old modern identities that are the ideas of being,
unity, coherence, duration, stability […], expose them for the fictions that
they are. Parodic compliance highlights the fragility of the mechanism:
there is no original reality, no pure Basque, no true man, no authentic
Uruguayan, no perfect woman. Neither is there a model [hijo]. (2014: 148)
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
3 ‘HIJOS DE UNA MISMA HISTORIA’: IDENTITY POLITICS … 83
The discussion in this chapter will consider two responses from the chil-
dren of the disappeared that exhibit just such a parodic engagement with
the essentialised image of the hijo. While Félix Bruzzone’s novel Los topos
(2008) offers a humorously grotesque resignification of the political fam-
ily unit and interrogates the societal expectations that are placed on the
child of the disappeared, Mariana Eva Perez’s published blog, Diario de
una Princesa Montonera (2012), radically intensifies this critique, wit-
tily and irreverently undermining the identity politics so often associated
with contemporary human rights organisations. Moreover, either implic-
itly or explicitly, both of these texts relate such politicisation of mourning
to recent governmental manoeuvres by the Kirchner administration.
If, as Linda Hutcheon states, parody distinguishes itself by its ‘self-
conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement’ (1989:
49), then the paradoxical tension that is to be found within both texts
between the ‘privileged position’ the authors enjoy as children of the
disappeared and the rejection of this very same label surfaces as a prime
example of the political critique contained within such parodic state-
ments. While Bruzzone’s novel places the focus on the continued and
unresolved aspects of violence and social exclusion in contemporary
Argentina, Perez draws our attention to the (as yet) unaddressed notions
of societal collusion and perverse spectacularisation of those directly
implicated by the violence of the Dirty War. ‘Through parodic compli-
ance’, signals Gatti, ‘the hard core of identity is not destroyed but it is
marked as arbitrary, as a convention and it is marked as something one
can even laugh at’ (2014: 151). As this chapter will argue, it is this
ostensibly irreverent assault on contemporary Argentine identity politics,
and the parodic approach that both Bruzzone and Perez exhibit towards
their own position as hijos, which reveal a more profound reflexion on
the continued effects that this unresolved past exerts on their present.
3.1 Part One: Traitors, Torturers and Transvestites:

Subverting the Political Family in Los topos
In an article written in 2009, Beatriz Sarlo declared that ‘Los topos no
podría haber sido escrita hace diez años. No porque Bruzzone tenía
entonces poco más de veinte […] sino porque debieron suceder algu-
nos hechos para que el campo de lo “escribible” sobre desaparecidos
se ampliara para aceptar el cruce de géneros y la comicidad’ (Los topos
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84 G. Maguire
could not have been written ten years ago. Not because Bruzzone was
little more than twenty years old, […] but because some things needed
to happen so that what was considered “writeable” regarding the dis-
appeared expanded to include the mixing of genres and comicalness)
(cit. Budassi 2008). Since its publication in 2008, the novel has fos-
tered significant critical debate over the tone of its engagement with the
theme of the disappeared, appearing in an era when Kirchner’s political
manoeuvres, as Mariana Eva Perez contends in relation to the novel,
‘permit[ieron] que haya lugar para la crítica, para la desacralización y
hasta para el humor’ (made space for criticism, for desacralisation and
even for humour) (cit. Wajszczuk 2010). Blending black humour with
the absurd, elements of autobiography with fiction, and invoking a spec-
trum of literary genres, Bruzzone’s novel recounts the protagonist’s
various fleeting relationships and sexual encounters as he travels through
Argentina and details his own process of becoming a transsexual.
As the narrator continues his journey in search of Maira, an abducted
transvestite sex worker who takes on an almost mythical importance as
his disappeared love interest, the character’s various involvements with
prostitution and violence, and indeed his own shifting sexual orienta-
tion, point to the insecurity of an identity which is, much like the other
authors and directors included in this book, persistently overshadowed
by his position as a child of the disappeared. Within the context of offi-
cial indemnifications, references to the ESMA and the increased public
endorsement of human rights organisations during the early Kirchner
era, the novel presents a critically parodic view of post-dictatorship
Argentine society, subverting the public construction of a political fam-
ily and undermining the intentions behind the governmental manoeu-
vres that had, after over a decade of impunity, once again inscribed the
cultural memory of the Dirty War within mainstream politics. ‘Hace
diez años’, as Perez suggests, referring to these years of impunity under
Carlos Menem, ‘no había nada de que reírse’ (Ten years ago, there was
nothing to laugh about) (cit. Wajszczuk 2010).
While the protagonist of Los topos makes very few—and only fleet-
ing—references to his parents’ disappearance, the entire narrative, as M.
Edurne Portela remarks, is nevertheless ‘anclada en un daño originario y
fuera de su control: su condición de hijo de desaparecidos’ (anchored in
an original wound, which was out of his control: his condition as the son
of disappeared parents) (2010: 168). In contrast to the traditional stories
of filiation and generational heritage that pervade discourses more closely
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
associated with human rights organisations such as HIJOS, Bruzzone’s

subversion of these classic genealogical links—and their ultimate per-
version as the novel draws to a close—points to the inherent tension of
an identity which at once actively distances itself from the wider public
marker of ‘hijo’ and yet assumes this label as the impetus for the entire
story. Through a consideration of Bruzzone’s engagement with human
rights organisations in the first half of the novel and by examining the
perverse family ties that characterise the later episodes in Bariloche, this
chapter explores how Bruzzone’s parody is not directed at individual
characters, but at broader trends in identity politics and militancy; criti-
cism, that is, directed towards the militant practices of the groups and,
more specifically, to the perceived legitimacy they attach to possessing
direct biological links to the disappeared. Given the suggestion that Maira
may be the protagonist’s disappeared brother, along with the confusion
created through the substitution of one father figure for another, the final
disturbing vision of the protagonist’s fate—what Cecilia Sosa has labelled
as the novel’s ‘nightmarish family romance’ (2013: 82)—points both to
the failure of contemporary society to suture the wounds of the dictator-
ship and to the cruel sense of circularity which places the violence from
Argentina’s recent past recurringly—and grotesquely—in the present.
3.1.1 The Politics of Mourning in the Kirchner Era

In his discussion of identity and belonging in the literature and cinema
of the children of the disappeared, Pablo Darío Dema points to the
peculiarity of the case of Los topos, signalling that ‘la marca distintiva de
Bruzzone es la casi total ausencia de reflexiones sobre la memoria, la
identidad, los derechos humanos y cualquier atisbo de discurso coher-
ente sobre la elaboración de un trauma en pos de un futuro’ (Bruzzone’s
distinctive trait is the almost total absence of any reflexion on memory,
identity, human rights or any glimpse of a coherent discourse surround-
ing the elaboration of trauma as a means of moving on) (2012: 7). While
Dema rightly signposts the move away from explicit markers of trauma
in Bruzzone’s novel, highlighting the reticence on the narrator’s part to
devote any discussion or emphasis on the wounds of his own personal
familial history, he does nevertheless overlook what is not so much an
absence of reflection on issues of cultural memory and human rights, as
a distinct move away from the more dominant modes of presenting such
identity politics. Sarlo, despite having previously criticised Albertina Carri
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86 G. Maguire
for exhibiting in Los rubios ‘un ejemplo demasiado pleno de la fuerte sub-
jetividad de la postmemoria’ (an almost too-good example of the strong
subjectivity of postmemory) (2005: 153), commends Bruzzone for hav-
ing distanced himself from the most obvious and conventional ways to
talk about the dictatorship, and for providing a text which shows both
originality and the willingness to move beyond narratives of victimhood
through a blend of distinct genres and literary devices. Moreover, high-
lighting various cultural and political landmarks that have changed the
social landscape of Argentina, Sarlo refers specifically to Kirchner’s ardent
public support of human rights organisations, before remarking on the
ramifications of governmental indemnifications and the military trials that
have been set up to prosecute high-ranking officials responsible for the
regime’s repression. ‘Todos estos hechos de la política no marcan directa-
mente la literatura pero crean condiciones de escritura’, she writes: ‘Se ha
cerrado una etapa. Bruzzone publica sus dos novelas1 en ese marco’ (All
these political occurrences do not brand literature directly, but they do
create conditions for writing. One phase has finished. Bruzzone is pub-
lishing his two novels in this new period) (cit. Budassi 2008).
At the outset, the novel does seem to inscribe itself within the more
classic frameworks of previous strands of Argentine testimony: ‘Mi abuela
Lela siempre dijo que mamá, durante el cautiverio en la ESMA, había
tenido otro hijo’ (My grandmother Lela always said that mum had had
another son while she was locked up in the ESMA) (2008: 11), asserts
the narrator in the first sentence. He quickly eludes expectations, how-
ever, and enters into a highly suggestive criticism of both the political
impetus of contemporary human rights organisations and their treatment
of historical memory. First, attacking his grandmother’s fixation with
the past and her decision to move closer to the ex-detention centre in
order to be ‘cerca del último lugar donde había nacido su otro nietito’
(closer to the place where her other grandson had been born), he writes:
‘Me molestaba la zona, sin zanjas, sin grillos, sin sapos; y sobre todo la
presencia constante de la ESMA. […] A veces hasta me daban ganas de
seguir a mi abuela en su historia delirante y salir a incendiar los jardines
o demoler el edificio a las patadas, o las dos cosas’ (The whole district
annoyed me, with no ditches, or crickets, or toads: what really annoyed
me though was the constant presence of the ESMA. […] Sometimes I
even wanted to follow my grandmother in her delirious quest and go
and set fire to the gardens or kick the building down, or both) (2008:
12–13). The narrator’s initial annoyance with the highly symbolic site of
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
the ESMA is indicative of his later dismissal of the wider human rights
cause, and the grandmother’s character, presented as a vulnerable and
slightly eccentric elderly woman whose obsession with her daughter’s
disappearance and potentially fictitious grandson dominate her everyday
life, strikes obvious similarities with the image of the Abuelas.2 When the
protagonist finds her outside the ESMA late at night, ‘grit[ando] que la
dejaran entrar, que quería ver dónde había estado su hija, dónde había
nacido su nieto’ (screaming for them to let her in, that she wanted to
see where her daughter had been, and where her grandson had been
born) (2008: 12), his cynical description of the entire scene lays bare
the sheer futility he observes in her objectives—there is, after all, no evi-
dence whatsoever that the grandson actually exists or that her daughter
was even pregnant at the time of her abduction—and presents a scathing
condemnation of Argentine human rights groups more broadly.
The site of ESMA maintains a strong symbolic link to the work of
human rights organisations, and particularly HIJOS, who, from the out-
set, were heavily involved in the planning and orientation of its re-open-
ing as a cultural centre. Kirchner’s dedicatory speech at the museum’s
official opening verbalises the contemporary insistence on recuperating
cultural memory with which Bruzzone takes issue, and highlights the
distinctly political nature that these influential familial ties were begin-
ning to assume:
Madres, Abuelas, Hijos: gracias por el ejemplo de lucha. […] Queremos

que haya justicia, queremos que realmente haya una recuperación fortísima
de la memoria y que en esta Argentina se vuelvan a recordar, recuperar y
tomar como ejemplo a aquellos que son capaces de dar todo por los
valores que tienen y una generación en la Argentina que fue capaz de hacer
eso, que ha dejado un ejemplo, que ha dejado un sendero, su vida, sus
madres, que ha dejado sus abuelas y que ha dejado sus hijos. (cit. Barros
2012: 27, my emphasis)
[Mothers, Grandmothers, Children: thank you for being an example of

our struggle. […] We want justice, we sincerely want a resolute recupera-
tion of memory so that Argentina may remember once again, that she may
remember those who gave everything for the values they held and may
look to them as examples; a generation in Argentina who were capable of
doing this, that have left an example, that have left a trail with their lives,
that have left their mothers, that have left their grandmothers and that
have left their children.]
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88 G. Maguire
Six months previously, Kirchner had also professed to an assembly of

United Nations’ members in New York that ‘we are all the sons and
daughters of the Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’
(cit. ‘Somos los hijos’ 2003) and here his continued insertion into this
political family through a shared ‘resolute recuperation of memory’ func-
tions once again as further public declaration of support for the activism
that was being carried out by those groups present. As Vincent Druliolle
has stated, this intertwining of memory and militancy not only trans-
forms private memory into an active public force in the present, but also
exhibits how ‘memory and the work of mourning have been redefined as
political and forward-looking’ (2011: 17). He continues: ‘The recovery
of the ex-CCDyTs3 illustrates that the trauma of disappearance may be
coped with through activism, or how mourning may turn into activism,
either to search for a corpse and/or build a memorial marker or fight
for a wider political project—in fact this shows that the latter [activism]
may be taken to entail a rejection of the former [mourning]’ (2011: 21).
It is this politicisation of mourning which Bruzzone, and indeed many
of his generation, have begun to challenge. For many of the artists con-
tained within this book, the homogenisation of individual experience
through collective activism obscures the intimately personal nature of
their grief. Furthermore, the appropriation and co-option of such loss by
political actors represents a considerable incursion of the public sphere
into the private, paradoxically echoing the dictatorship’s intrusion into
the domestic realm during the 1970s, and igniting this desire to retain
something of their parents’ histories unaffected by the national gaze.
Countering Kirchner’s petition that ‘Argentina may once again remem-
ber’, Bruzzone therefore attacks the restrictive identity politics associated
with these very public displays of mnemonic restitution. His narrative,
in this way, convincingly and consistently stresses the politicisation of
mourning that has come to characterise contemporary attitudes towards
the disappeared.
The narrator’s discussion of the ex-detention centre in the novel
focuses exclusively on the visual irritation it causes him, and, in contrast
to the Abuelas’ famous placards or HIJOS’ very public quests to uncover
information about their parents, not once does he offer any discussion
of the events surrounding his mother’s disappearance, refraining from
conjectures over what may or may not have happened there: the narra-
tive, in this sense, never goes beyond the superficial. Furthermore, nei-
ther the memory of his parents’ militancy nor details of their lives before
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
they were abducted figure in the novel as issues that deserve discussion.
Instead, Bruzzone actively eschews the tendency of documentaries such
as HIJOS: el alma en dos (Cespedes and Guarini 2002) and M (Prividera
2007) to insist on uncovering information and on basing one’s identity
on the repercussions of parental political action. The result, as Sarlo con-
tends, is a considerable achievement on the author’s part and a notable
anomaly within the framework of existing works which deal with the
topic of the Dirty War: ‘Cuando un tema grave logra, finalmente, liber-
arse del biempensantismo, se convierte finalmente en algo que la litera-
tura puede tocar. Los topos se afirma en el derecho de hablar de cualquier
modo sobre la ausencia de padres desaparecidos; ése es el derecho de la
literatura’ (When an issue finally liberates itself from bien-pensantism, it
finally transforms into something that literature can get grasp. Los topos
confirms its right to talk about the absence of disappeared parents in any
way; this is the privilege of literature) (cit. Budassi 2008). This explicit
irreverence, what Bruzzone has referred to elsewhere as his attempt to
introduce ‘enfoques diferentes [en] un tema agotado’ (different per-
spectives on a worn-out topic) (cit. Papleo 2010), is, throughout the
first half of the novel, characterised primarily by a flagrant dismissal of
human rights organisations, as the protagonist denounces the motiva-
tions behind members’ affiliation and considers them guilty not only of
political co-option but also of often fabricating a sense of loss and con-
nection to the disappeared for their own perverse satisfaction. ‘Casi todas
eran personas devastadas. O no devastadas, pero sí con un aire de devas-
tación’, he writes after his first encounter with HIJOS, before continu-
ing his parodic assault: ‘Había un ex compañera de secundaria de mamá
que estaba directamente loca’ (Almost everyone was devastated. Or not
devastated, but rather they had an air of devastation. There was one ex-
comrade of mum’s who was quite obviously mad) (2008: 42–43).
Interestingly, a considerable number of the characters that appear in
the course of Bruzzone’s works, and particularly those within his earlier
collection of short stories 76 (2007), are marked by the very same passiv-
ity which suffuses the protagonist’s attitudes towards his past in Los topos.
According to Dema, this paints the organisations in which they play a
part in a particularly inefficient and directionless light:
En los cuentos de Bruzzone los hijos emprenden averiguaciones y las aban-

donan para retomarlas pero olvidando que las habían comenzado, llevan
registros de datos plagados de equivocaciones, deambulan sin proyectos
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90 G. Maguire
de vida definidos, se emborrachan solos o con desconocidos cada vez que

vuelven de charlar con alguien que les habla de sus padres o les muestra
una foto. En vez de aparecer […] dispuestos a absorber los ideales de los
padres y redefinirse sintiéndose continuadores de proyectos de emanci-
pación, los buscan sin muchas convicciones, siempre un tanto abúlicos y
con un aire de desconcierto. (2012: 7)
[In Bruzzone’s stories, the children of the disappeared set out on inves-
tigations without finishing them, only to resume them later without real-
izing they’d already begun; they record information that is riddled with
mistakes, they wander around with no definite plans, they get drunk alone
or with strangers every time someone mentions their parents or shows
them a photo. Instead of appearing as ready and willing to absorb their
parents’ ideals and redefine themselves as continuations of these projects of
emancipation, they go looking for them half-heartedly, always largely apa-
thetic, always with an air of confusion.]
Such disinterest and overt derision are often pushed to their limits in
the course of the novel as Bruzzone contentiously mocks the recognised
language and symbols of the dictatorship era. From Ford Falcons to the
disappeared themselves, these societally entrenched symbols are removed
from their historical context and applied to aberrant—and often darkly
humorous—contemporary social concerns. In one of the most flagrant
displays of parody, the protagonist describes the abducted prostitute
Maira as a ‘post-postdesaparecido, es decir [uno de] los desaparecidos
que venían después de los que habían desaparecido durante la dictadura
y después de los desaparecidos sociales que vinieron más adelante’ (post-
postdisappeared, that is one of the disappeared who come after those
who had been disappeared during the dictatorship and after the socially
disappeared who came later on) (2008: 80). Removing the specific his-
torical reference from such a culturally loaded word and reapplying it
to a social deviant such as Maira is boldly provocative for contempo-
rary Argentine society—that is, not only does releasing the term from
its historical specificity heighten the novel’s irreverence, but, significantly,
it also provides an extremely potent source of critique for the present
by drawing attention to the remnants of Argentina’s turbulent history
that are still at work in today’s society. As Emilio Bernini affirms, it is
Bruzzone’s ability to infuse parody with a sharp critique of the persis-
tence of violence and social exclusion in contemporary Argentina which
gives Los topos such a powerful political efficacy. Bernini writes:
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
[E]l efecto paródico nunca tiene como objeto a la travesti en sí misma,

sino a la política. La política es aquí objeto de la parodia, la política de la
militancia, la política identitaria, que supone la creencia, en última instan-
cia, en la acción en ese mismo mundo histórico que, a pesar de los cambios
políticos, no sólo ha desaparecido a los padres sino que ha devastado la
vida de los hijos. (2010)
[The parodic impulse never targets the transvestite herself, but politics. It
is politics that is the object of parody here; the politics of militancy, iden-
tity politics, a politics that assumes a belief in action, as a last resort, in
this same historic world that, despite political changes, has not only disap-
peared the parents but is also devastating the lives of their children.]
Indeed, in this respect, it is important to note that it is not Maira’s sex-

ual preferences or orientation that are the target of the narrator’s criti-
cism but the way in which she executes her revenge by sleeping with
ex-military repressors before murdering them, an act the narrator sees as
particularly perverse given her status as a child of the disappeared. In an
effort to call attention to what he considers to be HIJOS’ pervasive pre-
dilection towards militancy, no matter the objective or cause, Bruzzone
then imagines the group to ‘armar una campaña de reivindicación, alzarla
[Maira] como estandarte de una nueva generación de desaparecidos y
fogonear así la lucha antiimperialista’ (put together a vindication cam-
paign, to raise Maira as the flagbearer of a new generation of disappeared
people and feed the anti-imperialist fire) (2008: 80). The ease with which
he exchanges the object of the group’s campaign, from the previous gen-
eration’s political desaparecidos to a contemporary social deviant such as
Maira, belittles the very core values of their ideological intentions: it is,
as Bruzzone contends, largely activism for activism’s sake. The change in
focus from the parents of those involved to the disappeared transsexual,
combined with the inherently derisive comparison of the two within the
text, reflects the protagonist’s refusal to contemplate his own familial his-
tory, satirising the historical period in question and convincingly setting
Los topos firmly apart from previous representations of the Dirty War.
3.1.2 Madres, Abuelas and HIJOS: The DNA of Performance

Throughout the post-dictatorship period, the very public campaigns
of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo had continuously sought
to assert the victimhood and innocence of their disappeared family
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92 G. Maguire
members, continually drawing upon the deeply private nature of their

grief as a weapon in the collective demand for public justice and retribu-
tion.4 Due to the heavily patriarchal model of the family unit propagated
by the military regime, the Madres and Abuelas, generally assumed to be
publicly powerless, laid claim to the focal importance attached to their
position within the domestic sphere and, by ‘mov[ing] into the public
eye, challenging the state and crossing its artificial boundary from pri-
vate mourning to public politics’ (Malin 1994: 200), effectively vocalised
their private grievances and demands for justice on the national stage. As
Susana Kaiser remarks in her detailed study of the Madres’ protests, ‘By
turning motherhood into a public activity, they crucially reset the bound-
aries of politics and political spaces. By conquering and remapping terri-
tories, both physical and metaphorical, they shaped the style and scope of
human rights activism’ (2011b: 343). Andrea Malin similarily observes
that ‘[t]he mothers had no ideological constraints, or political experi-
ence to taint them. Based on the cultural and ideological conceptions of
motherhood, being a mother offered a sense of security. They were con-
scious of the public acceptance of their role as mothers and they used it
as a shield’ (1994: 204–205). Indeed, the appropriation of this potent
familial metaphor and the politicisation of broken filial links became the
military dictatorship’s ‘Achilles heel’ as ‘[p]rotestors used the moral sta-
tus accorded to the family to lodge claims for relatives who were ‘disap-
peared’, arrested or murdered, and then used this position to support
wider human rights movements’ (Bystrom 2010: 140, 142).
While the Madres and Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo had turned their
‘interrupted mourning process’ into ‘one of the most visible political dis-
courses of resistance to terror’ (Suárez-Orozco 1991: 491), both during
the period of the dictatorship and in the years afterwards, HIJOS repre-
sented a generational shift in how personal loss was performed in public,
using escraches to shame ex-military repressors and challenge contempo-
rary apathy through this very explicit form of activism. ‘Carnivalesque
and rowdy’, as Diana Taylor asserts, escraches actively involved unaffili-
ated spectators, canvassing the neighbourhoods of former torturers for
weeks beforehand and engaging erstwhile apathetic residents to the
point where ‘HIJOS [found] themselves accompanied not just by human
rights activists but by those incensed that they continue to live in such
close proximity to political violence’ (2002: 152). No longer seeking to
prove that the disappeared had actually existed, but pressing to obtain
justice and legal retribution, this ‘DNA of performance’—their brand of
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
political activism characterised by the very public exhibition of culpabil-

ity, inherited from the Madres and the Abuelas and their weekly marches
outside the Casa Rosada—impelled them to become more active,
increasingly militant and unwaveringly more visible on the national stage.
‘Si no hay justicia’, they promise, ‘hay escrache’ (If there’s no justice,
there’s escrache) (2002: 149).
Cespedes and Guarini’s previously mentioned documentary HIJOS:
el alma en dos foregrounds the nature of the group’s activism, follow-
ing various factions as they conduct meetings and carry out their public
exhibitions of the continuing societal presence of those responsible for
the military administration’s repression. While in various scenes, and to
varying degrees, the participants reject the fundamental political ideolo-
gies of their parents’ militancy, they do however largely exhibit what they
consider to be their hereditary responsibility to seek justice and retribu-
tion as they piece together the fractured and incomplete strands of their
own familial narratives. ‘Siempre la historia de mis padres fue mi histo-
ria’, attests one of the three main participants: ‘La historia de cada uno,
las sensaciones, las emociones, […] esa historia como algo que necesi-
tás recuperar’ (My parents’ story was always my story; everyone’s story,
the sensations, the emotions, […] this is the story we need to get back).
Reflecting on this biologically pre-figured trait of the second genera-
tion’s activism, Gabriela Nouzeilles claims that ‘to many sons and daugh-
ters of the disappeared, inheritance means assuming a mimetic, derived
identity, to the extent that they may see themselves primarily as embodi-
ments of the traumatic loss of disappearance’ (2005: 266). Indeed, while
the Kirchners’ administrations gave HIJOS an increasingly prominent
role on a national scale, even inviting them to act as prosecutor in the
public trials of high-ranking military officers from 2005 onwards, Los
topos actively distances itself from such essentialised identity politics and
overtly public performances of memory. Instead, the novel parodically
addresses the question of who bears the legitimacy to ‘remember’ in
contemporary Argentina and, as will now be discussed, ridicules the cel-
ebrated familial ties that lie at the very core of the group’s activism.
In her discussion of the use of testimonial humour by the members of
the HIJOS, Cecilia Sosa writes: ‘If during the late 1990s [the organiza-
tion] was proud of defining itself as a horizontal group, unspoken dis-
tinctions and positions of status nevertheless cut across the group. These
hierarchies were mostly related to the extent to which each member had
been affected by state violence’ (2013: 80). By conducting interviews
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94 G. Maguire
with many of the members of the organisation, Sosa concludes that these
direct claims of kinship to the disappeared precipitated a sense of social
ranking, an unspoken principle which dictated the position of one hijo in
relation to another. Where the children of desaparecidos may once have
been reluctant to reveal themselves as relatives of disappeared left-wing
militants, Sosa rightly argues that, within the protective and empowering
atmosphere of HIJOS, such loss was not only a prerequisite but a cele-
brated, even risible marker of victimhood. ‘In some oblique way humour
confirmed the “privilege” of the victims’, she continues, ‘it delineated a
peculiar form of community elitism among the descendants. […] They
called it “a question of pedigree”’ (2013: 80). As one daughter of the
disappeared discloses in an interview elsewhere:
Yo, por ejemplo, tengo dos [puntos], dos padres, o sea que yo tenía un pun-
taje alto. […] Yo venía ganando porque había otra que sólo había desapare-
cido su padre, pero después hay otra que había desaparecido su padre, su
madre, y las parejas de su madre y su padre, ésa nos cagó a todas. (2013: 150)
[For example, I had two points, two parents, so that was a good score.
[…] I was winning at that point because there was someone else who only
had a disappeared father; but then someone else came along who had a
disappeared father, mother, and their respective partners, so she ruined
everything for the rest of us.]
During various early passages of Los topos, Bruzzone draws the reader’s
attention to this absurd sense of rivalry, at first gently mocking his girl-
friend, Romina, and her ‘inauthentic’ sense of affiliation, before going
on to undermine any sense of ‘privilege’ through the character of Maira
and her deviant forms of retribution. The inherent tension here between
Bruzzone’s criticism of such fabricated bonds of victimhood and his
instinctive participation in such hierarchy is made overtly apparent dur-
ing his description of Romina who, despite not having any personal
familial links to victims of the dictatorship or indeed knowing ‘muy bien
qué era todo eso de los desaparecidos’ (really very much about the disap-
peared), becomes an active member of HIJOS in ‘un gesto de compro-
miso’ (an act of commitment) (2008: 16, 17). He remarks:
Para colmo, [Romina] empezó a insistir con eso de que militar en HIJOS
me iba a hacer bien, que la gente de ahí adentro era muy valiosa. […] Lo
que me molestaba –y ésta era una de nuestras discusiones favoritas– era que
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
ella siempre se empecinaba en ponerse por encima de mí, superior, ella mi

salvadora y yo el idiota, el ciego que negaba trescientas veces la única ver-
dad. (2008: 20–21)
[To top it all off, Romina started insitisting that militancy with HIJOS
would do me some good, that people there were really brave. […] What
annoyed me—and this was a particular sore point for us—was that she
always insisted on looking down on me, from above, as if she was my sav-
iour and I was the idiot, the blind man who insisted on repeatedly denying
the obvious truth.]
Not only condemning the reasons behind the group’s militancy, but also
undermining the significance of their affiliation by exposing the elitism
he sees in such a perverse hierarchy, the protagonist then—paradoxi-
cally—criticises those who align themselves with the group without hav-
ing any particular convincing or direct link to the disappeared. ‘No sé
cómo estaban las relaciones entre [Romina] y su madre’, he remarks
mockingly, ‘pero lo primero que se me ocurrió fue que a la señora la
militancia en HIJOS no debía gustarle, que no tenía por qué padecer
que su hija militara en una organización de personas sin padres’ (I don’t
know how things were between Romina and her mother, but the first
thing that came to mind was that her mother couldn’t have been keen
on her daughter’s involvement with HIJOS; there was no reason for her
to put up with her daughter participating in an organisation for orphans)
(2008: 21). Moreover, in a later encounter with another member of
HIJOS whose connection fails to be as ‘direct’ or as ‘legitimate’ as his
own, this inherently contradictory attitude towards the lack of biologi-
cal relationship to the disappeared becomes increasingly apparent: ‘Su tía
había desaparecido en Córdoba’, he disparagingly observes, ‘hubiera sido
bueno que se juntara con Romina y fundaran SOBRINOS, NUERAS,
no sé’ (Her aunt was disappeared in Cordoba; it would have been good
for her to get together with Romina to found NIECES, DAUGHTERS-
IN-LAW, whatever) (2008: 18).
The Argentine sociologist Hugo Vezzetti, in an article detailing
human rights organisations’ engagement with cultural memory in con-
temporary Argentina, draws attention to the fact that the identity politics
of the escrache is based on ‘un nosotros que más allá del trabajo personal
del duelo busca transformarse en el punto de partida de una acción
pública’ (an us that goes beyond the work of personal grief to become
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96 G. Maguire
a point of departure for public action) (1998: 3). While Vezzetti under-
scores the inherent tension within the act of the escrache, which ‘en la
afirmación del vínculo de sangre como condición de ese combate parece
ponerse en juego […] un fantasma familiar que trae a la vida al desapare-
cido bajo la figura del revolucionario y mediante el recurso de ocupar su
lugar’ (through affirming blood ties as a condition for this fight seems
to speak to a familiar ghost which posits the figure of the disappeared
militant as a revolutionary, and then takes their place) (1998: 7), he
fails to comment on the wider identity politics that characterise both its
execution and those who affiliate themselves with the group despite not
having direct links to the disappeared. The protagonist of Los topos not
only insinuates that his girlfriend’s attraction to him is borne solely out
of his position as a child of the disappeared, but also, again irreverently
employing the recognised symbol of the Ford Falcon, reads the escraches
as a form of revenge which embodies a continuation of the militant ide-
ologies and actions of the previous generation and, critically, echoes the
repressive practices of the dictatorship. He writes:
Yo, la verdad, nunca me había asomado a HIJOS, y la insistencia de

Romina no llegaba a convencerme. Sí me atraían algunas cosas. Eso de los
escraches, por ejemplo, que para mí eran una forma de revancha o de jus-
ticia por mano propia, algo muy de mi interés pero que por cobardía, o
idiotez, o inteligencia, nunca concretaba. A veces hasta pensaba en pedirle
a Lela los papeles del auto […] venderlo, comprar un Falcon y salir con mis
amigos a secuestrar militares. (2008: 17, my emphasis)
[In truth, I’d never shown my face in HIJOS, and Romina’s insistence
never quite convinced me. Of course there were a few things that attracted
me. The escrache thing, for instance, which seemed to me to be a type of
revenge, taking justice into your own hands, an interesting aspect for me,
but I never made it, whether through cowardice, idiocy, or intelligence.
Sometimes I even thought of asking Lela for the car documents, […] sell-
ing it, then buying a Ford Falcon and going out with my friends to abduct a
few members of the military.]
This type of collective retribution, later described by the narrator as

a direct response on the part of the second generation to the years of
absent institutional justice during post-transition impunity, is pre-
sented as an integral part of the group’s activism, acting outside of the
legal domain and within the politics of the social sphere. Indeed, while
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
insertion into HIJOS supposes a reinsertion into society through a

framework of active social bonds and a motion to vindicate the previous
generation, it is precisely this political stance and call to activism, under-
taken not only by the group’s members but expected by their affiliation,
which bears the brunt of Bruzzone’s criticism. As Portela remarks,
La gran repercusión que ha tenido el trabajo político de HIJOS en los

últimos quince años ha provocado que se haya homogenizado la percep-
ción de qué significa ser parte del colectivo de hijos e hijas de familias con
desaparecidos. Se ha aceptado la idea de que ser ‘hijo/a’ significa militar, ser
activamente político/a y reivindicar el discurso de la ‘generación perdida’, es
decir, la generación de sus padres. (2010: 170, my emphasis)
[The great repercussion that the work of HIJOS has had over the last fif-
teen years is to homogenise what people consider being a son or daugh-
ter of the disappeared to entail. We’ve accepted the idea that to be an ‘hijo’
means to be a politically active member and to vindicate the discourse of the
‘lost generation’, that is, the parents’ generation.]
In this sense, the character of Maira appears in the novel’s narrative as

both a means of diversifying this essentialised image and as the parodic
exaggeration par excellence of such homogenised notions of what is
requested by society from a child of the disappeared. When the protago-
nist finds out that Maira is also a daughter of desaparecidos, and after a
typically oneiric episode in which the narrator’s own paranoia leads him
to suspect her of being ‘una espía o algo así’ (a spy or something like
that) involved in ‘un complot internacional para acabar con la homo-
sexualidad en el mundo’ (a conspiracy to put an end to homosexuality
throughout the world), it is revealed that Maira had moved to Buenos
Aires almost one year before to become a ‘mata-policías’ (police-killer)
and to ‘asesinar a ex represores, muchos de ellos aún en servicio’ (assas-
sinate ex-repressors, many of whom were still in office) (2008: 45, 60,
61). Indeed, while Diego Benegas, in his article entitled ‘If There’s No
Justice…’, points out that the escrache does ‘not cross the boundary to
inflict physical harm on the target person; it stops, literally at the door-
step, [s]howing that they could but will not take revenge’ (2011: 26),
Maira’s character, on the other hand, literally assumes the responsibility
of realising such revenge. The fact that her actions are tacitly endorsed—
though, admittedly, officially rejected—by various members of HIJOS
in the course of the novel renders the critique all the more scathing,
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98 G. Maguire
particularly given the fact they are carried out by a transvestite sex worker
who is not only engaged in a sexual relationship with the protagonist but
is also, potentially, his brother; with this, Bruzzone takes the parody to
its hyperbolic climax, perversely embodying through Maira the fabri-
cated bonds of fraternity between members of HIJOS while also paint-
ing a grotesque picture of revenge, retribution and deviance. Presenting
the members of HIJOS as vengeful militants whose affiliation with the
group functions, in many cases, merely as a badge of honour rather than
an explicit and direct connection with the disappeared, Bruzzone thus
foregrounds the politicised and aberrantly hierarchical family ties that
he considers the group’s activism to perpetuate. Significantly, one of the
narrator’s final encounters with HIJOS precedes a crucially suggestive
episode during the same night in which his girlfriend becomes pregnant,
and then informs him a few days later of her intention to have an abor-
tion. While the reader never finds out whether or not the termination
eventually took place, the apathy with which the narrator treats the issue
is of extreme importance—he is, for the large majority of the novel, una-
ble and unwilling, both politically and biologically, to form a part of any
coherent family unit whatsoever.
3.1.3 A Perverse Family Romance

It is, however, essential to examine the inherent contradictions that are
to be found within Bruzzone’s condemnation of the identity politics
associated with human rights organisations and his derision towards the
very public disclosure of familial bereavement. Throughout the novel, as
has already been stated, the protagonist actively distances himself from
any meaningful biological links, ridiculing the family unit and purging
any importance from such genealogical ties. At the same time, however,
he consistently berates those members of HIJOS who hold only indi-
rect or tenuous connections to the disappeared, satirising the fabricated
legitimacy he considers such affiliation to imply. As Diana Kordon and
Lucila Edelman conclude, ‘Los grupos de HIJOS tienen la particulari-
dad de que la afiliación garantiza la filiación: así se ha creado la figura
del Hijo, a secas, que implica simultáneamente reconocimiento y marca
social’ (groups such as HIJOS exhibit a peculiarity in that affiliation
guarantees filiation: they’ve created the Child in that way, simultaneously
implying recognition and social status) (2004). It is, on the one hand,
precisely this broader affiliative relationship that transcends the family
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
unit and overrides any purely biological link which Bruzzone condemns;
yet, on the other, as the narrative progresses, any exclusionary insistence
on direct biological links, and the authority this may represent, is also
undermined. While Portela suggests that ‘La búsqueda contra-reloj del
protagonista […] se une a una necesidad constante de amar y ser amado
que confunde lo filial y lo puramente sexual’ (the protagonist’s counter-
clockwise quest […] joins together with a constant need to love and be
loved which confuses the filial and the sexual) (2010: 177), Fernando
Bogado contends that the quest is undertaken ‘no porque haya algo
perdido que recuperar, sino porque la ausencia misma invita al mov-
imiento, como si fuera la gasolina que alimenta el motor de la novela’
(not because there is something lost that needs to be found, but because
absence itself invites movement, as if it were the fuel for the novel’s
engine) (2008). It is precisely this affective absence, narrated through—
and despite—the intense confusion the protagonist feels as a result of
losing his parents, along with the inability to view the world through
anything but this familial paradigm and underlying sense of loss, that
serves as the inexorable catalyst for his journey. As the narrator is gradu-
ally left with fewer and fewer social relationships and repeatedly denied
any sense of lasting friendship or sexual connection, the need to replace
these becomes all the more explicit. ‘Desde la muerte de Lela, Maira y
yo habíamos empezado a tener sexo’, he confesses early on in the novel,
before embarking on a journey which will ultimately culminate in a
grimly caricatural family setting: ‘Instinto de reproducción y superviven-
cia, supongo. Algo distorsionado pero puro instinto’ (Since Lela died,
Maira and I have started having sex. A reproductive, survival technique, I
suppose. A bit twisted but purely instinctual) (2008: 33).
In one of the few episodes in which his father is mentioned, the pro-
tagonist enters into a daydream after creating a Batman and Robin cake
for one of his grandmother’s bakery clients. He writes: ‘Pasé buena parte
de la noche frente a la torta. La escena, en algún momento, cobró vida:
papá era Batman y Maira y yo éramos Robin. Un Batman y dos Robin.
[…] Robin-Maira volvió a cambiar de rumbo y le reprochó a Batman-
papá todos sus años de ausencia’ (I spent a large part of the night in
front of the cake. The picture, at some point, came to live: dad was
Batman and Maira and I were Robins. One Batman and two Robins.
Maira-Robin changed direction and told dad-Batman off for all his years
of absence) (2008: 69, 71). While the three superheroes discuss the most
effective methods of launching an attack on various mafia groups, with
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100 G. Maguire
the father suggestively instructing that ‘ten[ían] que dividir[se]’ (they

had to split up), (2008: 70) the humour contained within the episode
prevents the true emotional register of the father’s abandonment from
being conveyed. Furthermore, the recurring confusion between the pro-
tagonist and Maira both in this scene and later episodes with El Alemán,
combined with the frequent discussions over the possibility of a sibling
relationship between them, points to an identity that, though deeply
disorientated, is nevertheless in constant search of close social relation-
ships. When the protagonist differentiates his grandmother’s search from
his own, the biological illogic of suggesting that his brother’s birth took
place separately from his pregnant mother reveals the confusing internal
emotional register at play in the novel. Moreover, the attempt to detach
himself from the ESMA further points to the desire to undertake this
journey outwith the confines of human rights organisations. He writes:
Mientras buscaba a Maira, además, empecé a sentir la necesidad de confir-

mar u olvidar para siempre la versión de Lela sobre mi supuesto hermano
nacido en cautiverio, como si las dos búsquedas tuvieran algo en común,
como si fueran parte de una misma cosa o como si fueran, en realidad, lo
mismo. […] Mi búsqueda, distinta a la de Lela, no tenía por qué necesitar
de un lugar para vivir cerca de la ESMA. ¿Por qué suponer que mi hermano
había nacido donde mamá había estado secuestrada? (2008: 41, my empha-
sis)
[On top of that, while I was looking for Maira, I started to feel the need
to either confirm or forget forever Lela’s story about my brother born in
captivity, as if the two things had something in common, as if they were
part of the same time or as if, in reality, they were exactly the same. With
my search, which was different to Lela’s, I had no reason to live close to
the ESMA. Why should I think that my brother was born where my mother
had been imprisoned?]
While Sosa discusses the character of Maira against the backdrop of

the ‘wounded family’ and rightly signposts her inclusion in Los topos as
‘the troublemaker at the table of victims, the killjoy of their moments
of state comfort’ (2013: 82), her analysis fails to grasp the full extent
of the role that the disappeared transvestite plays in the novel. ‘She is
the one for whom there are no clear affiliations; she is the queer one in
the family of victims’, she contends: ‘In this movement, the reader is
invited to embrace Maira as her own adopted relative’ (2013: 82). It is,
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
however, highly problematic to confuse the protagonist’s own attraction

towards Maira in the course of the novel with such a wider public accept-
ance; she has, by the end, remained resolutely and consistently without
any social connections whatsoever, and to suggest a broader appropria-
tion of her character would be to conform to the very identity politics
that Bruzzone seeks to undermine. The character, while also providing
the impetus for the entire story, effectively represents the failure of such
affiliative processes and becomes the prime example of the dissolution of
the family unit as a result of dictatorial violence. Though the search for
Maira is unwavering, as the narrative of Los topos recounts, she is, in the
end, both entirely elusive and grotesquely deviant.
The traditional family unit finds itself undermined not only through
these perverse sexual identity politics in which potential siblings become
lovers and vice versa, but also through the complete rejection of any
redeeming qualities of the father figure. While many of the children of
the disappeared infuse their narratives with a sense of abandonment and
openly question the political choices of the previous generation, such as
Albertina Carri’s Los rubios or Laura Alcoba’s Los pasajeros del Anna C
(2012), Bruzzone takes this critique to its very limits by labelling the
protagonist’s father as one of the novel’s eponymous topos: traitors, turn-
coats or deserters. While merely a few passing remarks are made about
his mother, even less information is known about his father, with only
one explicit biographical reference mentioned during a conversation with
an elderly relative. He writes:
Pero cuando cayó preso por primera vez todo se le complicó. Estaba con
mamá en un grupo que después de la muerte de Perón había quedado mal
parado y terminó, ya en libertad, por ceder a los temores maternos y dedi-
carse a entregar compañeros. […] Empezó él a traicionar a los que tenía
más cerca, incluida mamá. (2008: 136)
[But when he went to prison for the second time, everything got more
complicated. He was with mum in a group that had ended badly after
Peron’s death, and, once he got out, he gave into his maternal fears and
decided to hand over his comrades. He betrayed everyone who was close
to him, even mum.]
The scathing view of his father’s failed militancy and the exceed-
ingly intimate nature of his disloyalty very flagrantly point to a definite
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102 G. Maguire
rupture between Bruzzone and his contemporaries. While the theme

of betrayal among militants has been included in other texts such
as Ernesto Semán’s Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China (2011) and
Laura Alcoba’s Casa de los conejos (2008), Bruzzone’s complete refuta-
tion and sheer reluctance to talk about his parents—except to reveal their
disloyalty—is a resounding indication of his unwillingness to associate
with any contemporary organisations that aim to use historical memory
to celebrate publicly these broken genealogical links. Furthermore, the
narrator punctuates his discussion of his father with a cynical nod to the
objectives of HIJOS, drawing parallels between contemporary activ-
ism and the failed militancy of the 1970s and intertwining his father’s
betrayal with the attitudes he had previously berated in the characters of
Romina and Ludo: ‘Papá había llegado a la política, como muchos de
los jóvenes de aquellos años’, he explains, ‘por amigos que militaban y
por ese impulso de la juventud de siempre querer hacer algo diferente,
nuevo’ (Dad had got involved with politics in much the same way as
many young people in that time, through friends who were active and
through this teenage impulse to always want to do something different,
something new) (2008: 136).
The suggestive resignification of the family unit in the closing scenes
of the novel, or what Sosa refers to as the novel’s ‘astonishing, scorn-
ful and terrifying family romance’ (2013: 82), is infused with striking
elements of perversion and irony. Having been abducted by a charac-
ter known as El Alemán, a violent ex-repressor who frequently subjects
the narrator to physical and sexual abuse, the protagonist then ampli-
fies the previous uncertainty surrounding her relationship to Maira and
also gradually comes to confuse her abductor for her father: ‘El Alemán
podía ser el padre de Maira, mi padre, el torturado, un entregador, el
torturador, el boxeador golpeador de travestis’ (El Alemán could’ve been
Maira’s dad, my dad, the victim, a snitch, the torturer, an anti-transves-
tite boxer) (2008: 174).5 Closely mirroring the protagonist’s father’s
earlier denouncement as a topo, it is revealed that Maira too had had a
sexual relationship with El Alemán and had branded him with the same
derogatory label: ‘La loca [Maira] cada tanto me decía papá, vos sos mi
papá, […] hasta me inventaba una historia de doble agente, decía que
yo había mandado a matar a su vieja, que era mi mujer o mi novia, […]
me decía topo, topo choto (Maira, the madwoman, would call me ‘dad’
every now and again, ‘you’re my dad’, […] she even concocted a spy
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
story about me, saying I had been sent to kill her mother, that she was
my wife or my girlfriend, […] ‘you’re a mole’, she would say to me, ‘a
fucking mole’) (2008: 162–163). Moreover, by fusing the characters of
El Alemán and his father through their labelling as topos, Bruzzone’s sub-
version of the established family unit becomes all the more perverse.
In a later passage, after having undergone surgery for breast implants
and still under the influence of anaesthesia, the narrator dreams of a ludi-
crous and highly subversive image of her new family unit, infused with
references to the failed ideology of the 1970s. ‘Lo que Maira quería, lo
que quería mamá, y papá a su manera, mundo nuevo, nuevo mundo,
hombre nuevo, hombres felices […] las hermanas blancas, las más puras,
las hijas de la nieve, del frío más intenso que se vuelve noche de amor’
(What Maira wanted, what mum wanted, and dad in his own way, was
a new world, a new man, happy men […] white sisters, who were the
most pure, daughters of the snow, of the most intense cold which then
turns into a night of love) (2008: 162–163). In this aberrantly idealised
rereading of her confused biological ties, in which the present and the
past become disturbingly interwoven, it is the definitive impossibility of
achieving such a situation that is continually emphasised; the failures of
the past, it seems, are deemed to repeat themselves in the narrator’s pre-
sent, underscoring the persistence of genealogical forces—however devi-
ant their emanation—despite the protagonist’s best efforts to stifle them.
Bernini, in his queer reading of the novel, contends that this engagement
with contemporary violence, ‘la continuidad del fascismo en el presente’
(the continuity of fascism in the present), along with an attempt to show
the continued repetition of the past in the present, is precisely what
makes the novel ‘profundamente política en su tesis’ (profoundly politi-
cal in its thesis) (2010). Indeed, even El Alemán’s choice of words seems
to link the two eras together in a bleakly violent critique of the present:
‘[S]í uno con los travestis hace muchas cosas, no todo es pagar por sexo:
uno puede matar travestis a cuchilladas, hacerlos desaparecer’ (You can do
lots of things with transvestites, it’s not all about paying for sex: you can
kill them with a few stabs, make them disappear) (2008: 117, my empha-
sis). Abducted and having lost all of her social relationships other than
her perverse new family unit, the ending of Los topos and the future for
the main character are intensely hopeless: removed from society and una-
ble to engage in any meaningful societal connections, she is, just like her
parents, destined to become disappeared forever.
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104 G. Maguire
3.2 Conclusion
As Pilar Calveiro remarks in Política y/o violencia, ‘El asunto es ése:
no acallar a las voces discordantes con la propia, sino sumarlas para ir
armando, en lugar de un puzzle en que cada pieza tiene un solo lugar,
una especie de calidoscopio que reconoce distintas figuras posibles’ (The
issue is this: not silencing those voices you disagree with, but adding
them together, so that instead of a puzzle where every piece has its own
place, you end up with a kaleidoscope that recognises different possible
permutations) (2005: 19). Providing a counter-argument to the homog-
enised identity politics of human rights organisations such as HIJOS,
Bruzzone adds his own distinctly personal narrative to the many contem-
porary works which deal with historical memory, addressing with biting
irony the recurring question of who—if anyone—bears the legitimate
right to remember in contemporary Argentine society. The protagonist’s
subversion of the political family unit and his own reluctance to exploit
or elaborate on his position as a child of the disappeared surface as a cri-
tique of the dominant discourses of victimhood and genealogy evident
in the practices of human rights organisations such as HIJOS. While, as
Ana Amado asserts, ‘HIJOS convierte cada iniciativa personal de memo-
ria en la comunidad de recuerdos que afilia a sus miembros como familia’
(HIJOS dissolves every personal initiative into a community of remem-
brance which binds its members like a family) (2009: 156), Bruzzone’s
narrator resists the collectivisation of his experiences within such dis-
courses and refuses to anchor any sense of identity purely on these bio-
logical ties and what they may entail for future political beliefs. Typified
by the numerous brief and fleeting relationships that the central protago-
nist recounts, many characters in the novel appear as fundamentally soli-
tary, either distanced from the collective activism of HIJOS or using the
organisation merely as a shield for their own personal acts of revenge—
examples, in other words, of the difficulty Bruzzone encounters in incor-
porating personal stories of loss within larger politicised narratives of
collective grief.
However, while Bruzzone’s criticism of HIJOS’ insistence on the
performance of biological ties runs throughout the narrative, there is a
considerable degree of irony that gradually increases towards the gro-
tesque apogee of the novel’s conclusion. While the protagonist eschews
any form of affiliation to the wider politically constructed family unit, his
unremitting search for Maira and explicit confusion of familial ties are
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
all elaborated through the paradigm of the family: lovers are confused
for siblings, ex-torturers become father figures, and sexual relationships
replace genuine familial connections. Despite the explicit lack of any con-
ventional reflection on the past, Bruzzone ‘no sólo no llama a la acción
política sino que señala la falta de opciones para resolver la devastación
de un presente brutal que ha nacido de un pasado brutal’ (does not
only call for political action, but he also signals the lack of options in
resolving the devastation of a savage present that was born from a sav-
age past) (Portela 2010: 182). By underlining the instability of the pro-
tagonist’s identity through his constantly shifting gender identification
and sexual orientation, combined with the eventual subversive display of
the family unit in all its affective, perverse and aberrant configurations,
Los topos thus points to the persistent significance of the underlying and
unresolved severed genealogical links that he continually experiences as
a child of the disappeared. If, as Karl Marx has asserted, history repeats
itself ‘first time as tragedy, second time as farce’, then Los topos surfaces
as the parodic and farcical repetition of the protagonist’s tragic familial
history; under the control of the ex-represor El Alemán, who now ‘se
dedic[a] a torturar, matar y hacer desaparecer a travestis’ (dedicates him-
self to torturing, killing and making transvestites disappear) (2008: 172),
the protagonist’s future seems just as bleak as his disappeared parents’
fate, underscoring the spectres of Argentina’s dictatorial past that remain
present and active in the lives of the children of the disappeared.
3.3 Part Two: A Disneyland of Human Rights:

The Language of Parody in Diario de una Princesa
Montonera
‘What’s in a post?’ asks Jodi Dean in Blog Theory, considering the frag-
mented nature of online journalling: ‘Anything. Blogging subjectiv-
ity isn’t narrativized. It’s posted. It’s not told as a story but presented
in moments as an image, reaction, feeling, or event. The post is a
form that expresses mediality as such’ (2010: 47). Reflecting the spo-
radic and fractured nature of the processes of memory that are at play
in Mariana Eva Perez’s Diario de una Princesa Montonera (2012), the
consecutive posts of her published blog do indeed appear unrestrained
by logical, temporal or narrative coherence, switching from accounts
of real-life encounters with politicians and fellow children of the dis-
appeared to oneiric sequences fuelled by her imagination in which she
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
106 G. Maguire
displays a very real desire to make contact with her disappeared parents.
Detailing the adventures of the Princesa Montonera, Perez’s online
pseudonym, the blog recounts her various high-profile encounters in
the domain of human rights organisations with a blend of realism and
fantasy that undermines traditional conceptions of memory and tes-
timony. The blog’s subtitle, 110% Verdad (110% Truth), positioned on
the front cover alongside the red Montonero star, already points to the
text’s playfulness with the boundaries of fact and fiction, hinting from
the outset at the extra parodic dose of creativity that Perez employs to
make up for the gaps and fissures in her own childhood recollections.
Though Perez is both a child of the disappeared and the granddaughter
of Rosa Roisinblit, founding member and vice-president of the Abuelas,
she chooses to distance herself from established strands of Argentine tes-
timony more closely associated with human rights organisations, with the
intention, as she notes in an interview with Página/12, to ‘quitarle el
peso testimonial de la escritura’ (remove the testimonial weight from the
act of writing) (Wajszczuk 2010). Perez’s unconcealed recourse to fic-
tion from her position as an ‘hiji’—her derisive term for a child of the
disappeared—publicly questions the validity of testimonial discourses
surrounding the Dirty War and persistently and provocatively reverts to
parody to subvert traditional conceptions of memory in contemporary
Argentine society. ‘¿Es Verdad o es Hipérbole?’, questions the Princesa
Montonera in one of her typically self-referential posts: ‘Lo dejo a tu
criterio, lector’ (Is this Truth or Hyperbole? I’ll leave that up to you,
reader) (2012: 27).
Not only does Diario de una Princesa Montonera reflect the diversi-
fication of media and the provocative amalgamation of fact and fiction
that characterise this post-dictatorship generation, but Perez also seeks to
broaden the conventional image of the child of the disappeared in a simi-
lar vein as Bruzzone. In doing so, she exposes what she considers to be
the prevailing focus within human rights organisations on ‘una minoría
muy privilegiada, urbana, educada, politizada, psicoanalizada’ (a consid-
erably privileged, urban, educated, politicised, psychoanalysed minority)
(2012: 21), and counteracts the dominant and restrictive depiction of the
militant practices that being a child of the disappeared is seen to entail.
This section of the book will therefore continue arguments begun in
relation to Bruzzone’s text concerning the simultaneous subversion of,
and insistence on, the paradigm of the family unit, focusing on Perez’s
engagement with notions of testimony and parody, and highlighting
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
the tension that is to be found between Perez’s self-proclaimed position

as a well-known daughter of the disappeared and her overt question-
ing of the authority and authenticity that any such marker may confer.
By examining the author’s intention to ‘discutir un discurso único que
pareció existir sobre el tema [de los desaparecidos]’ (question the unique
discourse that appears to exist on the topic) (cit. Rebossio 2012), this
chapter will also consider how Perez expands the boundaries of those
directly connected to past dictatorial violence through an assertion of the
moral accountability with which wider Argentine society must still come
to terms. Against the backdrop of Kirchner’s very public manoeuvres
towards ‘Memory, Truth and Justice’, the Princesa Montonera’s parodic
assault on contemporary human rights organisations and their restric-
tive identity politics breaks open the homogeneous and essentialised fig-
ure of the child: ‘[D]esde un lugar muy legítimo para los demás’, Perez
contends, ‘nos permitimos violentar aquello que se espera de nosotros’
(From what is considered a very legitimate position, we allow ourselves
to distort what is expected of us) (cit. Wajszczuk 2012).
3.3.1 El reino de testimonio

‘Given the conventional understanding of the manuscript diary as a pri-
vate record, a highly public on-line diary seems to be a contradiction in
terms’, affirms Catherine O’Sullivan in her discussion of the community-
orientated nature of blogs: ‘[T]his is the point at which the on-line diary
departs from the true literary tradition’ (2005: 68). Echoing Philippe
Lejeune’s contention that the online environment is ‘totalement opposé
aux conditions de développement du journal intime, fondé sur une autre
conception […] de la communication’ (totally opposed to the conditions
associated with the development of the personal diary, founded instead
[…] on communication) (2000: 193), O’Sullivan draws attention to the
interactivity of a medium which, once positioned in the realm of cyber-
space, suffuses what is otherwise private with a distinctly public hue.
There is, however, and particularly in the case of Diario de una Princesa
Montonera, a further important distinction to be made here between
the private self of the diary and the popular persona of the blogosphere,
despite the formal links in their historical trajectory. On her work on
autofiction and the post-dictatorship generation, Jordana Blejmar writes:
‘Though written in the first person, the narrative voice does not belong
to Perez. […] Using a pseudonym, common practice in the blogosphere,
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
108 G. Maguire
points at an essential characteristic of blogs: as well as being spaces of

self-representation, they are also “veils that will always conceal much of
their lives from their readers”’ (2012: 190). Indeed, while both Lejeune
and O’Sullivan rightly contest that the collective nature of such online
communication complicates the transfer between the private and public
spheres, Jodi Dean nevertheless maintains that there is a definite rup-
ture as a result of this shift, calling for the need to differentiate between
these media entirely through a clear demarcation of the person behind
the blog from his or her public nickname. Going further than Blejmar,
Dean points in Blog Theory to the interactive and participatory nature of
blogs as a pronounced split from earlier forms of written communica-
tion, underlining the importance of the fictive and increasingly dialogic
nature inherent in the construction of an online ‘self’. Dean writes:
As journaling, blogging appears as a technology of the self, a way of docu-

menting, reflecting on, and hence managing oneself. Although this idea
has some intuitive appeal, it is belied by the long history of self-writing.
The reduction of blogging to journaling overlooks the immense historical
variety in practices of writing and their relations to different kinds of selves.
Presuming a kind of singularity of the practice of self-writing, moreover,
this reduction takes as given the continuity of the self, as if the technolo-
gies of the self were somehow not productive, as if a self stood behind the
technologies of its own writing. (2010: 49–50)
While in Diario de una Princesa Montonera the reader can easily attrib-
ute the majority of the eponymous character’s traits, and also the events
in which she takes part, to Perez herself, there is nevertheless a strong
degree of fictive playfulness and fantasy that runs throughout the
assorted posts, with the online persona going so far as to mock any self-
referential aspects of her writing. ‘Volví y soy ficciones’ (I returned and
I am fictions) (2012: 24), she writes, dispelling any claim to authentic-
ity and truth we may ascribe to her work.6 The contemporary nature
of blogging, ‘a technology uncoupled from the illusion of a core, true,
essential, and singular self’ (2010: 56), allows in this way for the pre-
cise mediation of the author’s publicly accessible image, ostensibly
obscuring the frontiers between notions of public and private while at
the same time policing that which is presented for popular consumption.
Moreover, if in Los topos we see an attempt on Bruzzone’s part to draw
attention to the continued pervasiveness of the State within the private
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
familial environment and a direct aversion towards the politicisation of

mourning in post-dictatorship Argentine society, then the creation of
an explicitly fictional filter by Perez also seems to be an endeavour to
mediate—and, at the same time, parody—the elements of her own pri-
vate life that are considered property of the public sphere. By avoiding
the straightforward collectivisation of her experience as a child of the
disappeared through her semi-fictional and often outrightly irreverent
presence in the blogosphere, Perez is able to set her own parameters of
disclosure and, more broadly, exploit the more imaginative aspects of her
text in order to call into question the assumed legitimacy of testimonial
discourse in contemporary Argentina.
In one of her earliest entries, Perez gestures directly towards her
reluctance to present her blog as a conventional account of her experi-
ence as an hijo, declaring with biting sarcasm, ‘Tengo blog nuevo: Diario
de una Princesa Montonera. El temita éste de los desaparecidos et tout ça
[…] El deber testimonial me llama. Primo Levi, ¡allá vamos!’ (I’ve got a
new blog: Diary of a Montonero Princess. The little issue of the disap-
peared and that sort of thing. I got tired of fighting: there are things
that need to be told. […] My testimonial duty compels me. Primo Levi,
let’s go!) (2012: 12). The persistent use of diminutives such as ‘temita’
throughout the blog and the dismissive tone towards ‘los desaparecidos
et tout ça’ are increasingly aligned with the Princesa’s growing disdain
for the pervasive language of human rights organisations. This derisory
attitude is perhaps at its most explicitly intense during a blog entry enti-
tled ‘Testimonios’ (Testimonies) in which Perez recounts a meeting with
grieving mothers and grandmothers directly affected by state violence.
She writes:
Reté a una madre viejita. Después del enésimo relato idéntico, la patota
que no se identifica, el auto sin chapa, el hijo que no aparece más, el mal-
trato en la comisaría, las amenazas en el tribunal, lo de siempre, no pude
más y le dije que si todos nos ponemos a contar estas historias y a llorar, no
aprovechamos esta ocasión para pensar juntos nuevas estrategias de lucha.
Soy yo que no tolero otro testimonio más. (2012: 127)
[I challenged one of the little old mothers. After the zillionth identical
story, the faceless mob, the car with no number plates, the child who goes
missing, the mistreatment in the police station, the threats at the court,
the same thing as always, I just couldn’t take any more and I told her that
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
110 G. Maguire
if we all started to tell stories like that and cry, we wouldn’t be making the
most of the time we have together to think of new ways to continue the
struggle. I’m the one who can’t bear to hear one more testimony.]
As Blejmar contends in an article entitled ‘Ficción o muerte’, an epi-

graph that the Princesa Montonera uses to sign off many of her blog
posts, ‘El suyo, insistimos, se trata, en todo caso, de un testimonio de la
dificultad de dar testimonio, un poco en el sentido ya propuesto por el
film de Albertina Carri, Los rubios’ (Hers, again, is, in every sense, a testi-
mony about the difficulty of giving a testimony, in a sense rather like that
proposed by Albertina Carri’s Los rubios) (2012: 21). While both Diario
de una Princesa Montonera and Carri’s film do both effectively under-
mine the validity of testimonial discourse and question the undisputed
authenticity assigned to those directly implicated by the dictatorship’s
violence, the focus that Carri places on the obstacles presented by ‘the
haze of memory’ in Los rubios is here considerably expanded by Perez
to encompass a much more explicit criticism of the actions of human
rights organisations. In a similar fashion to Bruzzone and his criticism of
the tenuous nature of Romina’s links to the disappeared, Perez repeat-
edly focuses on the absurdity she discerns in human rights organisations’
public divulgation and perverse celebration of painful private memories
and the ridiculousness she perceives in basing a hierarchy on such inti-
mate feelings of loss. In a characteristically humorous post, infused with
irreverence for the ongoing work of HIJOS, the Princesa offers her blog
followers the chance to win a week with her by entering an online com-
petition:
¡El show del Temita! El reality de todos y todas. […] Cada día un acontec-
imiento único e irrepetible relacionado con El Temita: audiencias orales,
homenajes, muestras de sangre, proyectos de ley, atención a familiares de la
tercera edad y militontismo en general.7
Una vida 100% atravesada por el terrorismo de Estado.

¡Viví vos también esta vuelta a 1998!8
Mandá TEMITA al 2020 y cumplí tu fantasía. (2012: 39)
[The Temita Show! The reality show for everyone. […] Every day a new
unique and unrepeatable occurrence related to the The Temita: court hear-
ings, homages, blood samples, legal projects, attention to elderly relatives
and sillymilitancy in general.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
A life 100% guaranteed to be steeped in terrorism of the State.

You too can take a trip back to 1998!
Send TEMITA to 2020 and make your fantasy come true.]
Presenting herself as the star of the reality TV show—‘muy víctima del

terrorismo de Estado’ (very victimised by State terror) (2012: 171)—and
sarcastically setting herself up throughout the blog as an ‘hijo’ par excel-
lence, with self-designated terms such as ‘militonta precoz’ (precocious
sillymilitant) (2012: 13), ‘el vip del ghetto9 porteño’ (VIP of the Buenos
Aires scene) (2012: 13), ‘ex-huérfana superstar’ (ex-orphan superstar)
(2012: 144), ‘la esmóloga más joven, otrora niña precoz de los derechos
humanos’ (the youngest ESMA-er, a former human rights child prod-
igy) (2012: 34), Perez not only parodies the hierarchies she perceives in
groups such as HIJOS and the spectra used to measure loss on which
they are based, but also draws attention to what she considers an absurd
popular preoccupation with the figure of the child of the disappeared.
If in Los topos the narrator draws our attention to the absurdity of these
unwritten rankings, then in Diario de una Princesa Montonera Perez
pushes the satire further, turning the black humour that is to be found
among members of HIJOS back on itself with her perverse promise of
‘[u]na vida 100% atravesada por el terrorismo de Estado’ (2012: 39).
The denouncement of such objectification reaches its pinnacle only a few
pages later when the Princesa recounts another meeting with members of
HIJOS, constructing a problematic scene in which the internal hierarchy
of the group becomes confused with sexual desire. ‘¡Dormir con un hiji’,
she jokes, ‘otra fantasía realizada!’ (Sleeping with an hiji, another fantasy
checked off the list!) (2012: 48).
During an interview with La Nación entitled ‘La ficción es liberta-
dora’, Perez discusses the hegemony of certain established and prevailing
ways of talking about Argentina’s recent past and relates the discomfort
she feels as a result of the expectations placed on her as a descendant of
the disappeared. ‘[El testimonio] te encorseta muy fuertemente, tiene un
orden para contar la historia, hay determinadas palabras para usar’, she
explains: ‘[Q]uería renunciar la legitimidad que tengo como testigo para
contar esta historia. […] No sólo quise demarcarme sino incluso autoin-
validar esa voz’ (Testimony strongly confines you, there’s a way of telling
a story, there are certain words to use. I wanted to reject any notion of
testimonial legitimacy that I had with this story. […] I didn’t just want
to set myself apart, but also undermine this voice) (2012). Notably,
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
112 G. Maguire
this conception of contemporary testimonial discourse as restrictive and

homogenising is aligned quite explicitly by Perez to the ongoing political
actions of the Kirchner government, whose exploits, she contends, have
largely been the cause of such restrictive unwritten ‘rules’ of narrative
elaboration and of a situation in which a child of the disappeared must
adopt certain publicly visible attitudes and actions towards the legacy of
their parents. In one particular episode, the Princesa recalls her journey
to becoming an ‘hiji’, dryly enumerating the steps that a child of the dis-
appeared must take in order to ‘desempeñar su cargo con lealtad y patri-
otismo’ (carry out her role with loyalty and patriotism):
En la niñez, [la Princesa Montonera] reverenció de palabra a sus nobles

padres ausentes, mientras íntimamente y con culpa temía su regreso. […]
Fue a tantos homenajes a los compañerosdetenidosdesaparecidosyasesina-

dos que ya no puede contarlos. […]
Conoció a Kirchner y le contó que había llorado con su discurso de asun-

ción, cuando reivindicó a los desaparecidos y los puso a refundar la patria,
a la altura de los próceres y los inmigrantes. Espero no arrepentirme, lo
amenazó casi, porque ella siempre fue chúcara ante el poder. Te prometo
que no te vas a arrepentir, le contestó Kirchner. […] Oh, instante sagrado
en la vida de la princesa de la izquierda peronista. Clímax de fe en la
política, orgasmo de credulidad. (2012: 31, 28–19)
[In her childhood, the Montonera Princess venerated her noble, missing
parents out loud, while intimately and guiltily fearing their return. […]
She went to so many memorials for the disappeareddetainedandassassinat-

edcomrades that she can no longer count them. […]
She met Kirchner and told him that she had cried at his inaugural speech,
when he vindicated the disappeared and promised to build the homeland
up. ‘I hope I didn’t make a mistake’, she said almost as a warning, because
she was always bold in the presence of power. ‘I promise you won’t regret
it’, Kirchner replied to her. Oh, what a sacred moment in the life of the
left-wing Peronist princess. Climax of her faith in politics, an orgasm of
incredulity.]
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Not only does the treatment of her younger self in the third per-
son act as a distancing device, but the sardonic references to the cli-
chés of the practices of human rights organisations further heightens
the Princesa’s scathing overview of this politically directed protocol.
Indeed, while Perez herself had been involved with both HIJOS and the
Abuelas before Kirchner became President, she makes numerous refer-
ences to being ‘ech[ada] de ***’ (thrown out of ***), alluding to the
Abuelas,10 and details how her relationship with the Kirchners soured
during their time in the Casa Rosada. ‘Después sí me arrepentí, mucho’,
she writes, ‘me sentí usada, ¡forreada!, dejé de hacer la V’ (Afterwards
I did regret it, a lot. I felt used, abused! I stopped doing the V) (2012:
190). Accusing Kirchner of having politicised private mourning and of
co-opting and capitalising on individual stories of loss for his own polit-
ical gain, the Princesa Montonera draws parallels with the dictatorship
era and exposes how the public has once again infiltrated the private
sphere, resulting in the collectivisation, homogenisation and celebration
of intimate familial loss on a national stage. This, as she confesses on the
death of Néstor Kirchner, marked ‘el lowest point de [su] relación con
los Kirchner’ (the lowest point in her relationship with the Kirchners)
(2012: 190). Against the backdrop of the Kirchner era and the trans-
formation of the ‘hijo’ into a perversely celebrated public commod-
ity, Diario de una Princesa Montonera is thus not only Perez’s venture
at countering what she believes to be the stagnant and restrictive nature
of prevailing testimonial discourse but also an attempt to control what
aspects of her life remain untouched and unaffected by the penetrating
gaze of the politicised public sphere. ‘Intentaré transmitir’, she affirms
during a trip to Algeria, ‘cómo fue que Argentina pasó de ser el reino de
la impunidad a convertirse en esta Disneyland des Droits de l’Homme que
hoy disfrutamos todos y todas’ (I will try to explain how Argentina went
from being the Kingdom of Impunity to becoming this Disneyland of
Droits de l’Homme) (2012: 126).
3.3.2 Blogging El temita

‘¿Con qué nuevas palabras? ¿Cómo extraerme la prosa institucional
que se me hizo carne cuando escribía la propaganda que el Nene me
pedía y no me dejaba firmar?’, questions Perez, before adding: ‘¿Podrá
la joven Princesa Montonera torcer su destino de militonta y devenir
Escritora?’ (Which new words can I use? How can I remove myself from
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
114 G. Maguire
the institutional prose that formed me when I used to write the propa-
ganda that Nene asked me for but didn’t let me sign? Can the young
Montonero Princess change her destiny and become a Writer?) (2012:
46). Distancing herself from the contemporary militancy of HIJOS and
having been dismissed from her role within the Abuelas’ organisation,
Perez provides in her Diario a narrative that openly parodies much of
the established language of post-dictatorship human rights discourse.
While ‘hijo’ becomes ‘hiji’, for example, and ‘militante’ is consistently
changed to ‘militonta’, a practice which even warrants its own verb as
‘militontear’, more abstract notions are also brought under the Princesa’s
parodic spotlight: ‘Verdat’, ‘Identidat’ and ‘hijismo’ appear repeat-
edly throughout the blog’s posts, with special attention being drawn at
one point to the vacuous farcicality of a Facebook campaign to choose
‘la foto de tu desaparecidx favoritx’ (2012: 70).11 Moreover, the satiri-
cal commentary that follows many of the Princesa’s descriptions of fel-
low hijos, during which the mere biological fact of being a descendant
of the disappeared is notably accentuated above all other character traits,
points to the necessity that the author perceives in debunking the cul-
tural fascination that is placed on these sons and daughters, and empha-
sises the fabricated nature of the bonds that are created between them by
the foundational sense of a shared loss. ‘[M]e entero de que el panelista
Camilo García ¡es hiji por parte de madre!’, she writes mockingly while
watching her favourite ‘programa de chimentos’: ‘¡Qué salida del clóset
más inesperada! ¡Bienvenido al hijismo, compañero! Te abrazo fraternal-
mente y fraternalmente te sobo todo’ (I just found out Camilo García
is a child of the disappeared on her mother’s side! What an unexpected
coming out story! Welcome to childhood, comrade! I welcome you fra-
ternally and fraternally I embrace you) (2012: 73).
In her article on recent fiction from the children of the disappeared,
Adriana Badagnani maintains that,
Mariana Eva Perez va un poco más lejos en su cuestionamiento a los este-

reotipos mostrando, como en un trabajo antropológico, el congelamiento
de las organizaciones de Derechos Humanos en una liturgia que a ella le
parece exasperante. Perez ha dejado de buscar que las piezas del rompeca-
bezas finalmente se ensamblen y puedan restituirle la imagen de sus padres.
Si los vidrios de la identidad han estallado, solo cabe señalar la falta y la
carencia. (2013: 5)
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
[Mariana Eva Perez goes slightly further in questioning stereotypes, show-

ing, like an anthropological study, the stagnancy of Human Rights organi-
sations, which have become a liturgy that exasperates her. Perez has given
up on piecing together the bits of the puzzle, and on seeing the full pic-
ture of her parents. If the splinters of identity have shattered, the only
thing left to highlight is absence and lack.]
While Badagnani sees the work of this generation as a ‘lucha por el sen-
tido’ (fight for meaning) largely confined to the realm of cultural mem-
ory, and a reflection on the ‘mecanismos [de] la memoria [que] los hijos
suman al coro polifónico y polémico sobre las memorias en disputa del
pasado reciente en la Argentina’ (mechanisms of memory that the chil-
dren of the disappeared add to the polyphonic and polemic debates over
the disputed memories of the recent past in Argentina) (2013: 12), she
does however overlook the more far-reaching political implications that
such diversification entails. In a post entitled ‘En Caseros también se
hijea’, the Princesa Montonera reviews an email exchange with a screen-
writer in Caseros, adding her own humorous commentary between each
message:
Tiene que ser la chica que tenía puesta la Camiseta x el Juicio y Castigo.
Yo ya dije: hasta que no hagan un modelo entallado, no me la pongo. […]
A las que no tenemos lolas nos queda especialmente mal. Además la gorra
tachada está muy démodée. Supe tener una calco de una gorra tachada que
decía No al indulto en mi agenda 1990. Un fashion emergency a la izqui-
erda, por favor. […]
Si la idea es sensibilizar al público cholulo a través de las fotos de famosos

que se ponen la Camiseta x Juicio y Castigo, aquí van mis propuestas para
dos nuevas campañas que le darían una vuelta de tuerca al viejo slogan:
‘Yo me saco la Camiseta x Juicio y Castigo’
‘Concurso de Remeras Mojadas x Juicio y Castigo’
Desnudos cuidados y compromiso con la memoria. (2012: 75–76)
[It has to be the girl who was wearing the Justice and Punishment t-shirt.
I’ve already said, until they make a fitted version, I’m not wearing it. For
those of us don’t have tits, they fit particularly badly. And the branded cap
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116 G. Maguire
is really démodée. I had a copy of a branded cap in my 1990 diary that said
‘No to impunity’. Oh please, what a fashion emergency. […]
If the idea is to raise awareness among the idiotic public through pictures
of famous people wearing the Justice and Punishment t-shirt, then here are
my suggestions for two new campaigns that will give the old slogan a new
boost:
‘I take off my Justice and Punishment t-shirt’
‘Wet Justice and Punishment t-shirt competition’
Carefully nude with a commitment to memory.]
Although the parodic rejection of the values and activism of both con-
temporary human rights organisations and the Kirchner government may
seem to represent a distancing from political involvement altogether, the
critique that Diario de una Princesa Montonera advances is neverthe-
less markedly political. In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon argues
against the restrictive definition of parody as characterised by an inten-
tion solely to ridicule, drawing attention to how the trope both ‘self-
consciously and self-critically recognises its own nature’ (1985: 27) and
allows ‘modern artists [to] manage to come to terms with the weight of
the past’ (1985: 29). In a later publication, Hutcheon expands on her
discussion of the political aspects of postmodern parody, noting that ‘[it]
is doubly coded in political terms: it both legitimises and subverts that
which it parodies’ (1989: 101). Similarly to Los topos, there is an underly-
ing tension that runs through the posts of Perez’s blog: while Bruzzone
struggles to move beyond the familial paradigm, despite his sustained
criticism of the fabricated links of filiation proposed by human rights
organisations, Perez seeks to debunk the myth of the hijo while simulta-
neously presenting the author not only as a child of the disappeared but
one who, to a certain extent, actively adopts the position that Argentine
society has created for her. For Hutcheon, the ‘doubly coded’ political
tension that is to be found in postmodern parody does not, however,
render the critique any less effective, for while such discourse ‘may
indeed be complicitous with the values it inscribes as well as subverts,
[…] the subversion is still there’ (1989: 106). ‘This kind of authorized
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
transgression’, she continues, ‘is what makes it a ready vehicle for the
political contradictions of postmodernism at large’ (1989: 101).
While Hutcheon, in general terms, sees parody as an intrinsic part
of postmodern literature, and a struggle between power structures on
a more abstract level and unanchored within any particular cultural set-
ting, the Uruguayan sociologist Gabriel Gatti provides a much more
contextualised view of the nature and function of parody within post-
dictatorship Southern Cone society. In Surviving Forced Disappearance,
Gatti, himself the son of a disappeared militant, traces the figure of the
desaparecido and examines the ‘true break in meaning’ (2014: 3) caused
by severity of the dictatorship’s violence. He highlights what he consid-
ers to be the two dominant cultural approaches during the post-dicta-
torship period which deal with such a breakdown in meaning: first, ‘the
narratives of meaning’, which have as their very driving force a desire
to recuperate that which was ‘disappeared’, reassigning identity to the
anonymous figure of the desaparecido and thereby giving significance
to a fractured language devoid of meaning; secondly, ‘the narratives of
the absence of meaning’, which he closely associates with the particular
generation of which Perez and Bruzzone form part, and explains as the
acceptance of grief as a constituent element to be assimilated and the
desire then to appropriate these very intimate feelings of loss as intrinsic
parts of one’s identity, building ‘identity in the catastrophe’ (2014: 130).
The latter category, which characterises ‘artistas y expertos bregando
con el sinsentido’ (artists and experts battling with senselessness) (2014:
112), allows family members of the disappeared not to re-imbue the
remnants of their heritages with lost meaning, but to embrace such loss
and create new political meaning from these ruins. ‘Forging identity
from a rough place, an uncomfortable place, knowing that the identity
that is being forged there cannot renounce those marks, that the trauma
that forged it is still forging it’, he declares: ‘But, strange as it may be,
that is a livable, thinkable, even a creative place’ (2014: 135).
For Bruzzone and Perez, the tension which runs throughout their
works between that which is both intimately foundational yet satirically
transcended is therefore, in Gatti’s terms, not only an insurmountable
element of their position as children of the disappeared but also the
creative friction which defines and motivates their respective narratives.
In Diario de una Princesa Montonera, as the Princesa learns of Néstor
Kirchner’s death, this tension is made manifest. While she recalls their
initial meeting and lays bare ‘[sus] leyes reparatorias redactadas con el
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118 G. Maguire
culo y nunca revisadas, […] el uso y abuso de las Madres, […] el loteo
clientelar de la Esma’ (his reparative laws written with his ass and never
revised, […] the use and abuse of the Mothers, […] the clientelistic divi-
sion of the ESMA) (2012: 190), she is nevertheless overcome by grief
and begins to contemplate her own political choices: ‘Ahora resulta
que en el fondo siempre lo quise’, she writes, comforted by the image
of Cristina by his coffin and surrounded by other children of the disap-
peared: ‘No se puede ser más huérfano. […] ¿Cómo dudé de él? ¡Qué
desleal, qué poco Princesa Peronista!’ (Now it turns out that deep down
I did love him. I couldn’t be more orphaned! How did I doubt him?
How disloyal! What a terrible Peronist Princess!) (2012: 192–193). The
paradigm of the political family that evolved during the post-dictatorship
period and found its official national platform during the Kirchners’ gov-
ernments infuses the very foundations of Bruzzone and Perez’s texts,
and indeed many others included in this book, with this evident ten-
sion. This, for Gatti, is the ‘monstrous position’ (2014: 130) that the
children of the disappeared must occupy, marked indelibly by a sense of
loss that they cannot ignore but must learn to ‘manage’ (2014: 50). It is
for this reason, borne out of paradox, he writes, that ‘parody is the key
word’ (2014: 147). The parodic perspective of Diario de una Princesa
Montonera, targeted at both human rights organisations and society’s
attitudes towards those implicated by dictatorial violence, thus emanates
from this undesired yet inescapable position. From Hutcheon’s ‘double
bind’ of political engagement, a position ‘both deconstructively critical
and constructively creative’, Perez’s imaginative and often derisory tone
surfaces as her attempt to recognise a past that both plays an integral
role in her life yet one which cannot be allowed to dominate (1989: 98).
‘No había otras palabras de repuesto’, she concludes: ‘Ahora las esta-
mos inventando’ (There were no other replacement words. Now we’re
inventing them) (2012: 125).
3.3.3 From Percepticide to Reality Show

‘Hace unos años podía argumentar que cuando me despidieron de ***
me quedé sin abogados. […] Meses de reunionismo y después, nada’,
writes Perez in relation to her reluctance to prosecute those responsible
for abducting and disappearing her parents: ‘Hoy esa razón me suena a
excusa. La verdadera razón, la única, post Julio López, es el miedo’ (A
few years ago, I could’ve argued that it was because I was left with no
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lawyers after they kicked me out of ***. […] Months of meetings, and
then nothing. Now that sounds like an excuse to me. The real reason,
the only reason after Julio López, is fear) (2012: 200). Perez’s reference
to Jorge Julio López, who was disappeared for the first time during the
dictatorship and then again in 2006 after testifying against the military,
thus focalises attention on the strands of Argentina’s violent past which
remain active in the present.12 Moreover, as these connections are fur-
ther explored in various blog posts, Diario de una Princesa Montonera
not only draws attention to the continued effects of state repression in
the present but, significantly, also blames the perpetuation of such vio-
lence on the complicity of society both during the dictatorship and in the
years afterwards. In Pasado y presente: guerra, dictadura y sociedad, the
Argentine sociologist Hugo Vezzetti discusses the contemporary impor-
tance of a renewed critical understanding of the role that society played
during the dictatorship’s repression. ‘En un sentido profundo, la dicta-
dura puso a prueba a la sociedad argentina, a sus instituciones, dirigen-
tes, tradiciones’, he writes, ‘y hay que admitir que muy pocos pasaron
la prueba’ (In a very real sense, the dictatorship put society to the test, its
institutions, its leaders, its traditions, and one has to admit that very few
passed that test) (2002: 38). Through an analysis of the exculpatory
nature of the Nunca más report and the Theory of the Two Demons,
which he argues ‘devolvía[n] a la sociedad a un lugar que era a la vez de
inocencia y de pasividad’ (returned society to a position of innocence and
passivity) during the immediate post-transition period, Vezzetti discusses
the outstanding and unresolved ‘culpabilidad moral’ (moral culpability)
which still haunts contemporary attitudes towards Argentina’s recent
past (2002: 127). Pilar Calveiro, too, discusses this ethical accountability
in an earlier work entitled Poder y desaparición, underlining the need to
understand the detention centres not as isolated events separated from
society, but as intricate parts of a society that, although not entirely
complicit, was tacitly aware of the dictatorship’s violence. ‘La represión
consist[ió] en actos arraigados en la cotidianidad de la sociedad’, she
asserts, ‘por eso [fue] posible’ (The repression consisted of acts rooted in
the everyday life of society; that is why it was possible) (1998: 6).
Indeed, if Los topos radically widens the narrative from the author’s
position as a child of the disappeared to include the voice of the per-
petrator, be that of an ex-military repressor or a left-wing militant who
betrays his own family, then Perez’s Diario de una Princesa Montonera
expands this focus one step further to include those parts of Argentine
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120 G. Maguire
society that would normally consider themselves untouched by 1970s

state violence. This process is carried out by Perez with both expressions
of parody and incredulity towards the decades of indifference she consid-
ers society to have shown after the dictatorship’s regime: ‘Las odiaba’,
she writes in reference to those who responded to a television campaign
by the Abuelas seeking information regarding appropriated babies: ‘A las
que llamaban en 2003, en 2005, para contar que un día de 1976 Fulano
y Mengana habían traído a su casa un bebé, un hijo, decían, pero ella
nunca estuvo embarazada’ (I hated them. Those women who called in
2003 and 2005 to tell us that 1 day back in 1976 so-and-so and what-
shisname had brought a baby home, their own child, even though she
had never been pregnant) (2012: 41). While, as we have seen, Perez
distances herself from the more solemn and pervasive testimonial narra-
tives championed by both the Kirchners and contemporary human rights
organisations, here she takes this criticism further and shows the poten-
tially impudent and unfairly cathartic nature that such testimony may
assume: ‘Hombres y mujeres, sobre todo mujeres, que después de callar
durante veinte años, todavía esperaban que una les estuviera agradecida’,
she writes: ‘Preferían hacer un llamadito anónimo y tercerizar la respon-
sabilidad en las familias víctimas’ (Men and women, but mostly women,
who had stayed silent for twenty years, then expected us to thank them.
Women, mostly women, who didn’t have the guts to face the child in
question, now quite a bit older, to tell them what they knew. They pre-
ferred to make an anonymous little phone call and pass the responsibility
on to the victims’ families) (2012: 41). For the Princesa, therefore, the
anonymous nature of the campaigns not only contributes to Argentina’s
Disneyland des Droits de l’Homme, allowing participants to partake in the
these highly publicised trials without implicating themselves, but it also
provides a way to eliminate guilt without properly addressing the circum-
stances in which these crimes were carried out.
In Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor discusses how the nature of the
acts of disappearance in Argentina forced society to become silent and
implicit collaborators in the dictatorship’s repression. She writes:
The triumph of the atrocity was that it forced people to look away – a ges-
ture that undid their sense of personal and communal cohesion even as
it seemed to bracket them from their volatile surroundings. Spectacles of
violence rendered the population silent, deaf, and blind. […] The military
spectacle made people pull back in fear, denial and tacit complicity from
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the show of force. Therein lay its power. […] People had to deny what
they saw and, by turning away, collude with the violence around them.
(1997: 123)
Taylor labels this aesthetics of violence ‘percepticide’, noting its inher-

ently dehumanising force and stressing the impact such violence exerted
on society’s ability to comprehend the dictatorship’s repression. ‘To see,
without being able to do, disempowers absolutely. But seeing, without
even admitting that one is seeing, further turns the violence on oneself’,
she writes: ‘Percepticide blinds, maims, kills through the senses’ (1997:
123–124). For Perez, this act of ignoring such obvious acts of violence
attracts what is perhaps the harshest criticism in the course of the blog’s
posts. During one of the Abuelas’ telephone campaigns, the Princesa
receives a phone call from a woman who had known the whereabouts
of her appropriated brother, Gustavo, born and taken from her mother
during her incarceration in the ESMA. The elderly woman, later sardoni-
cally given the name of Dora La Multiprocesapropiadora, had breastfed
the baby in the presence of two military officers in order to calm him
down, but had failed to report any crime, an action that the Princesa
finds wholly reprehensible:
Ése es para mí el núcleo de la sordidez de la denuncia. Una mujer le da

la teta a un bebé de cinco días que no es suyo, que es de otra madre, que
pasará a otras manos, y no le importa. A tragar mentiras de ahora en más,
bebé. […] DENUNCIANTE 1, que le dio la teta y le ocultó su historia
durante veintiún años, me parece más perversa que Videla. (2012: 45, my
emphasis)
This is, for me, the absolute sordidness of those informants. A woman who
breastfed a five-day-old baby that wasn’t her own, that was another moth-
er’s, knowing it would be passed on to other parents, and she didn’t even
care. Swallowing lies from that point onwards, baby. INFORMANT 1,
who breastfed the baby then hid her story for twenty-one years; I consider
that to be more perverse than Videla.]
In ‘Escribiendo memorias de la dictadura: Las asignaturas pendientes del

cine argentino’, Susana Kaiser notes that this problematic issue of soci-
ety’s collusion in the Dirty War has been largely ignored in post-dicta-
torship Argentine culture. As Kaiser contends, this is largely due to ‘un
proceso generalizado de auto-engaño que hace difícil mirar hacia atrás
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122 G. Maguire
con honestidad y reconocer qué se hizo y qué no se hizo durante esa

época’ (a generalised process of self-deception that makes it difficult to
look honestly at the past and recognise what one did and what one did
not do during this period) (2010: 108). While Perez sees such omissions
in the work of cultural memory along the same lines as Kaiser, she does
however proceed to suggest that the process has largely been worsened
by the actions of both human rights organisations and the Kirchnerist
government, who have tacitly exonerated wider society from their vary-
ing degrees of complicity in return for their approval of the public activ-
ism and campaigns of groups such as HIJOS and the Abuelas. ‘[L]
lamaban con la fantasía de protagonizar una película de suspenso, hab-
laban en clave, pedían reserva’, she writes: ‘Las campañas activaban un
nuevo cholulismo: la audiencia quería formar parte del reality show por
la identidad’ (They would call with the fantasy of becoming the hero
of some thriller, speaking in code, asking for discretion. The campaigns
triggered a new type of fandom: people wanted to become part of this
reality show over our identity) (2012: 41, 44).
Just as Bruzzone attempts to refocus contemporary attention on the
violence and social exclusion that still persist in Argentina today, Perez,
in this way, also underscores the unresolved elements of the dictatorship
era that have not yet been sufficiently addressed, despite legislative and
social progress in the domains of both culture and politics. Exposing
the discomfort she feels with the contemporary cultural attraction of the
descendants of the disappeared, Perez widens the scope of those asso-
ciated with the military’s crimes during the dictatorship and condemns
both the violence that society witnessed and also the silence they per-
petuated in the aftermath. The parodic perspective that fuels the Princesa
Montonera’s posts takes as its driving force a sheer incredulity towards
a society that now boldly partakes in the commodification of the chil-
dren of the disappeared.13 ‘A mí tampoco me gusta ocultar la historia’,
she writes, ‘Pero, ¿cómo contar que hubo una mujer que supo durante
veintiún años que Gustavo había sido robado a su mamá asesinada y que
un día, llama a las propias víctimas y hace una denuncia anónima?’ (I
don’t like covering up history either. But, how on earth can I explain
that there was a woman who knew that Gustavo had been stolen from
his assassinated mother for twenty-one years, and then decided 1 day to
call the victims themselves and make an anonymous complaint?) (2012:
46). Interestingly, this is an issue which is often echoed through the self-
reflexive nature of the blog itself: despite the interactive nature of the site
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and the many exchanges between Perez and her readers, there are some
posts which receive no attention at all. ‘Cuando puteo a Gustavo en el
blog’, writes the Princesa, after criticising a fellow hijo, ‘nadie comenta’
(When I had a go at Gustavo in the blog, no one commented) (2012:
95).
This ‘ethos of immediacy at the heart of journal blogging’ (Reed
2005: 227) sets Diario de una Princesa Montonera apart from other
contemporary cultural products from children of the disappeared, and
affords Perez the ability to expose the continuing gaps in the debates
surrounding the recent past, and to do so with a sense of urgency and
contemporary relevance. As Jill Walker Rettberg suggests in Blogging:
‘To really understand blogs, you need to read them over time. […] It
cannot be read simply for its writing, but is the sum of writing, layout,
connections and links and the pace of publication’ (2008: 5). It is, there-
fore, from her ‘lugar privilegiado’ (Gatti 2008: 49) within these dis-
courses of biological legitimacy and through the immediacy of the blog,
that Perez widens the scope of societal responsibility from the inside and
points to these aspects of the cultural memory of the Dirty War that are
yet to be sufficiently addressed. As Silvia Schwarzböck attests, ‘[L]o que
en la Argentina estaba sucediendo en [la dictadura] lo juzgamos hoy
más por lo que entonces sucedía adentro de un campo de concentración
que por todo lo que sucedía afuera de él’ (Today, what was happening
in Argentina during the dictatorship is judged more by what happened
inside the concentration camps than by everything that happened out-
side them) (2007: 66). In debunking the ‘reality show’ that she considers
human rights groups to have provoked in the Kirchner era, Perez reveals
that it is not only the children of the disappeared who have questions still
to answer, but the wider society of contemporary Argentina as well.
3.3.4 Conclusion
‘Pienso en la genealogía mítica que se armó, las madres y las abuelas,
los desaparecidos y [Kirchner], y los hijis otra vez huérfanos, como dice
el compañero legislador porteño hiji’, writes the Princesa Montonera
on Kirchner’s death: ‘No es que acuerde ni me guste, pero está ahí, no
puedo ser tan necia de no verlo’ (I think about the mythical genealogy
that has been created by the mothers and the grandmothers, by the dis-
appeared and Kirchner, by us children who are ‘orphaned again’, as the
Buenos Aires legislator puts it. It’s not that I agree or disagree with it,
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124 G. Maguire
but it’s there, and I can’t be stupid enough to ignore it) (2012: 194).
Indeed, while Perez explicitly negates the restrictive identity politics and
ongoing public co-option of private familial histories by the Kirchner
administration, the awareness of the fundamental significance and
authority of the political family provides a contrasting strand of tension
to the narrative of Diario de una Princesa Montonera. Caught within the
very boundaries it seeks to destabilise, the text’s parodic treatment of the
landscape of human rights reveals the deep-seated paradoxes that form
the basis of the identities of the children of the disappeared. Though
achievements within the domain of human rights are given due recogni-
tion in the course of the blog, the Princesa Montonera does neverthe-
less draw the reader’s attention to the perversion she perceives within the
officially endorsed image of the hijo: an ostensibly problematic position,
she contends, which publicly capitalises on intimate notions of loss and
grief and becomes the focal point for a wide range of unrelated social
issues. ‘Una mujer que habla mucho, con voz muy fuerte y parece ser
una militonta full time de todo’, she mockingly writes of one ‘hiji’ she
encounters: ‘los derechos humanos, los chicos de las villas y los per-
ros abandonados’ (One woman who speaks a lot, in a very loud voice,
and who seemed to be a full-time sillymilitant of everything: of human
rights, of slum kids and of abandoned dogs) (2012: 37). On the death
of her grandmother, the scathing overview she presents of the elderly
woman’s militancy within the Abuelas further points to the vacuousness
and self-serving attitudes the Princesa discerns in contemporary desires
to recuperate memory: ‘A Argentina le encantaba padecer frente a un
público. En *** era la más llorona y victimizarse siempre fue su droga.
Coherente, murió en horario de visita’ (Argentina always liked people to
watch her suffer. In *** she was the one to complain the most, and pity-
ing herself was her drug. In keeping with that, she died during visiting
hours) (2012: 52).
While Perez’s decision to write an online blog allows her to mediate
the elements of her life that are presented for public consumption, it also
reflects the very difficult interplay between the public and private which
typifies Diario’s narrative. During one of the first dates with her boy-
friend Jota, for instance, the extent to which the intimate and the pub-
lic have been intertwined in post-dictatorship Argentine society becomes
evident: ‘Suben la escalera que va a Capuchita, ella anteúltima, Jota al
final’, she writes on a tour of the ESMA, ‘Jota aprovecha y le toca el
culo. Ella es feliz. En la escalera que va de Capucha a Capuchita’ (They
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climbed up the stairs, her second last and Jota at the end. Jota took
advantage of the situation and touched her ass. That made her happy.
In the stairway that goes from the Capucha to the Capuchita) (2012:
18).14 While the ESMA itself may be seen as a symbol of such tensions
over the public expression of intimate loss, here the flirtatious exchange
between the couple is both jarringly inappropriate for the space in which
Perez’s parents were tortured and murdered and also, more abstractly,
representative of the tensions that surround the position of the hijo and
the depersonalised nature of their loss in the Kirchner era.15 Moreover,
in the same episode, the Princesa’s desire to hang a star, ‘como en un
camarín de Hollywood’ (like on Hollywood Boulevard) (2012: 15), out-
side the torture chamber where her mother was detained points to the
contemporary tendency the Princesa Montonera perceives in the pub-
lic exhibition of intimate notions of loss. The denunciation of the con-
siderable incursion of the State into the familiar and private realm of
mourning is combined with a critique of discourses of victimhood as
the Princesa negates contemporary testimony for its adherence to cer-
tain socially expected rules of elaboration. Allowing Perez, in her own
words, to ‘sacarle la mayúscula a la palabra “Verdad”’ (remove the capi-
tal letter from ‘Truth’) (cit. Blejmar 2012: 191), Diario de una Princesa
Montonera thus surfaces as a fictionalised and subjective counter to the
mainstream narratives of testimony so often associated with human rights
organisations and, additionally, as a petition for a more heterogeneous
understanding of the figure of the child of the disappeared; retaining, all
the while, certain elements of her own life out of reach from the parodic
public posts of her Princesa alter-ego.
3.4 Conclusion: Politicised Mourning,

Parodic Memory
‘Memory far exceeds any factual recounting, however important the
latter may turn out to be as an initial juridical or political step’, writes
Idelber Avelar in The Untimely Present: ‘The memory of the dictatorship,
in the strongest sense of the word, requires another language’ (1999:
64). As both Los topos and Diario de una Princesa Montonera show in
the course of their narratives, the imaginative fictionalisation of histori-
cal fact and the dynamic interplay between autobiography and fantasy
do indeed contribute to the diversification of ways in which the effects
of Argentina’s recent dictatorial past may be recounted. Through their
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126 G. Maguire
sustained use of parody and humour, these texts draw attention to the
dominance of prevailing strands of accepted testimonial discourse and to
the politicisation of historical memory, particularly against the backdrop
of the Kirchner era. Moreover, if Bruzzone questions how the individ-
ual child of the disappeared must interact with the collective, refusing
the subsumption of his own personal sense of loss within the commu-
nal activism of the whole, then Perez pushes this criticism further, explic-
itly problematising the collective itself, exposing the vacuous nature of
their politically co-opted testimonial discourses and the perverse contem-
porary insistence on the figure of the hijo. While both texts eschew any
conventional engagement with the cultural memory of the dictatorship,
their differing formats allow them to do so in contrasting ways, produc-
ing narratives that are controversial precisely as a result of the critique
that they offer of contemporary Argentina: Bruzzone through references
to the persistence of societal violence, elaborated from the realm of fic-
tion; Perez, from the interactivity and immediacy of the blogosphere,
responding to the present-day fascination with the figure of the hijo by
disclosing what she considers to be contemporary society’s unresolved
complicity in the very crimes which resulted in her orphanhood.
‘[T]he human rights movement actively and militantly devotes its
efforts to activating memory, promoting recall, pointing out which
events have to be retained and transmitted’, writes Elizabeth Jelin in ‘The
Politics of Memory’: ‘The goal goes beyond setting up historical archives;
it is a political and ideological task that stems from identifying remem-
brance with the construction of a political culture and identity’ (1994:
50). The target of the parodic treatment contained within both Los
topos and Diario de una Princesa Montonera is, therefore, not the indi-
vidual characters themselves—Maira, El Alemán, Argentina or Dora La
Multiprocesapropiadora—but the restrictive and collaborative construc-
tion of identity politics within human rights organisations, government
and, indeed, among society as a whole. Far from being ‘todos hijos de
una misma historia’ (all children with the same story), as HIJOS would
suggest, Bruzzone and Perez undermine such rigid and homogenis-
ing collectivisation and seek alternative individual and distinct modes to
express their very personal sense of grief. However, as July de Wilde and
Ilse Logie contend in their article on irony and the cultural production
of the children of the disappeared, ‘Es llamativo, además, que la ironía
sólo parezca aceptarse cuando es autoironía, es decir, cuando sus produc-
tores están investidos de la legitimidad de haber vivido la experiencia de
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la pérdida en carne propia’ (It is striking, too, that this irony only seems
to be accepted when it is directed towards oneself, that is, when those
who use it command a legitimacy that comes only from direct first-hand
experience of loss) (2016). To be sure, this paradoxical position that the
‘hijo’ occupies is represented in both texts; as Bruzzone struggles to
move beyond an emphasis on the familial, despite his sustained insist-
ence on the subversion and perverse reconstruction of the political family
unit, Perez also exhibits this sense of ‘autoironía’, publicly and parodi-
cally destabilising both the image of the child and the pervasive language
of human rights discourses, yet only as a result of her circumstance as a
well-known daughter of left-wing desaparecidos. Caught within the pre-
vailing paradigms they try to undermine, both texts thus reveal the neces-
sity, as Gatti remarks, of playfully assuming ‘a monstrous position’, by
endeavouring, at once, both to transcend narratives of absence yet also
to appropriate such intimate feelings of loss as an integral part of their
identity (2014: 146). This self-undermining aspect of the generation’s
parodic treatment of contemporary politics is narrated, as he explains in
an earlier publication, through ‘una cierta experiencia normalizada de la
catástrofe’ (a certain normalised experience of catastrophe):
El humor negro opera de nuevo sobre el estigma y lo invierte: no oculta la

marca que les hace especiales, la multiplica. Esta estrategia se consuma con
un ejercicio de enorme potencia: nombrarse como grupo acudiendo a la
marca que los hace raros. Lo hacen de maneras que para un lego […] sor-
prenden, si no directamente escandalizan. (2014: 114, 151)
[Black humour transforms this stigma and inverts it: it does not hide what
makes them special, it multiplies it. This strategy is consummated with an
enormous potential: identifying as a group through the very marker that
makes them special. They do it in ways that, for a legacy, surprise readers, if
not directly scandalise them.]
Through the outright rejection, resignification or parodic subversion of

the politically constructed family unit, these authors thus point to the
problems inherent in the politicisation of mourning and deny the col-
lectivisation of their own private history within the whole. Furthermore,
against the backdrop of the Kirchner era, these texts reveal how any such
experiential incorporation may not only deny individual processes of
mourning, but also, through co-option by political actors, display how
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
128 G. Maguire
such appropriation represents the continued incursion of the State into

the private lives of individuals. As Carlos Gamerro remarks, Bruzzone’s
narrative reveals ‘algo totalmente inesperado: un hijo de desaparecidos
que no quiere ser hijo de desaparecidos’ (something completely unex-
pected: a child of the disappeared who doesn’t want to be a child of the
disappeared) (cit. Friera 2014). Indeed, by distancing themselves from
what is both politically and socially expected from a child of the disap-
peared, Bruzzone and Perez continue the radical diversification of his-
torical memory through their contentious incorporation of fact and
fiction, autobiography and fantasy, reverence and parody. There are, for
this generation of authors, directors and artists, many ways to remember
Argentina’s recent past and many ways to assume their position as a child
of the disappeared.
Notes
1. Sarlo is here referring to Los topos and Bruzzone’s previous short story col-
lection, 76 (2007).
2. The grandmother’s name, Lela, also means ‘silly’ in Spanish.
3. Ex-Centros Clandestinos de Detención y Tortura.
4. The Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo was founded in 1977 and the
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo in 1983. In 1986, the Madres split into two
factions: the original Asociación and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea
Fundadora.
5. At this point in the novel, the protagonist identifies as a woman, having
spent most of the second half of the novel as a transvestite.
6. This statement ridicules Evita Perón’s famous promise, ‘Volveré y seré
millones’ (I will return and I will be millions). The Princesa Montonera
also substitutes the Peronist saying, ‘Si Evita viviera, sería montonera’ (If
Evita were alive, she would be a Montonera) for the derisory ‘Si Paty [her
mother] viviera, sería mi enfermera’ (If Paty were alive, she would be my
nurse) (2012: 90).
7. Over the course of her Diario, the Princesa Montonero regularly distorts
the spelling of words commonly associated with the human rights sphere.
This will be discussed at greater length later in the chapter.
8. 1998 is the year in which Perez joined the Abuelas to work in their pub-
licity department, before resigning a few years afterwards.
9. ‘Ghetto’ is used in the course of Diario de una Princesa Montonera to
denote the human rights collective in Argentina, and particularly the
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
10. Throughout the blog Perez writes ‘***’ to mean Abuelas, the organisa-
tion of which, as previously stated, her grandmother is a founding mem-
ber and current vice-president.
11. Silvana Mandolessi comments on Perez’s use of neologisms in her recent
article, writing that ‘a esas palabras Mariana Pérez [sic] las torsiona, en
clave de humor la mayoría de las veces, para volverlas palabras privadas.
[…] [L]a palabra “militancia” como término sagrado, inmaculado, pierde
su halo’ (Mariana Pérez [sic] twists these words, most of the time using
humour, to refashion them into private words. […] The word “mili-
tancy”, otherwise a sacred, unblemished term, loses its halo) (2016: 131).
12. López was disappeared on 18 September 2006, just a few hours before he
was due to deliver his final testimony against Miguel Etchecolatz, a cen-
tral figure in the dictatorship’s early repression. He remains disappeared
at the time of publication.
13. In ‘Memory Inventory: The Production and Consumption of Memory
Goods in Argentina’, Susana Kaiser discusses the ‘commodification’ of the
figure of the hijo: ‘Thursday afternoon at the Plaza de Mayo, the Madres
hold their weekly March, and several members attend to a stand around
which a crowd gathers to buy products- ranging from books to key rings.
[…] Monday night after a performance of the Teatro X la Identidad, the
public buys T-shirts outside of a downtown theater. On a windy Saturday
afternoon, under the highway that replaced Club Atlético, a center for
torture and extermination, dozens of people attend the inauguration of a
new “espacio de la memoria”, and activists from H.I.J.O.S. concurrently
sell T-shirts and calendars. The list goes on’ (2011a: 313).
14. ‘Capucha’ and ‘Capuchita’ refer to distinct parts of the main ESMA build-
ing, where, respectively, detainees were held and then tortured.
15. See Susana Draper’s article entitled ‘The Business of Memory:
Reconstructing Torture Centers as Shopping Malls and Tourist Sites’ (2011)
for a more detailed exploration of the debates of the use of the ESMA.
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gwm23@cam.ac.uk
CHAPTER 4
Hijos guerrilleros: Childhood Militancy

and Cinematic Memory
‘Todos están presos ahora, por culpa del niño que apenas sabía hablar’,
recounts the seven-year-old narrator of Laura Alcoba’s La casa de los cone-
jos, shortly after hearing a story in which the baby of two Montonero mil-
itants inadvertently directed military officers towards his parents’ secret
embute1: ‘Pero mi caso, claro, es totalmente diferente. Yo ya soy grande,
tengo siete años pero todo el mundo dice que hablo y razono como una
persona mayor. A mí ya me explicaron todo. […] Yo he comprendido y
voy a obedecer’ (Everyone’s in prison now, all because of that little kid
who barely knew how to talk. But with me, of course, it’s totally differ-
ent. I’m already big; I’m seven years old and everyone says that I already
talk and think like a grown-up. […] They’ve explained everything to me.
I understand it all and I intend to obey) (2008: 18). As the child’s sub-
jectivity in the novel becomes directly dependant on her successful entry
into the language and protocol of adult militancy, the life of Alcoba’s
semi-autobiographical protagonist thus exposes the problematic inter-
action between the political actions of the parents’ generation and the
child’s precarious position in the margins of a politicised familial environ-
ment. Furthermore, more fundamentally, the text also comes to problem-
atise the traditional view of children as ‘dependent and passive recipients
of adults’ actions’ (Lee 2001: 8) and of childhood as ‘representative of
a category whose significance lay[s], primarily, in what [it] reveals about
adult life’ (James 2009: 35). While Henry Jenkins contends that conven-
tionally ‘we imagine [children] to be noncombatants whom we protect
from the harsh realities of the outside world’ (1998: 2), recent narratives

gwm23@cam.ac.uk
134 G. Maguire
such as Alcoba’s have revealed the extent and intensity of the politici-
sation of the childhood experience during the dictatorship period in
Argentina, forcing us, as a result, not only to reassess the historical effects
and contemporary consequences of such domestic incursions of left-wing
militancy, but also to reconsider our understanding of the nature and
challenges of childhood itself and its relationship with the political.
Indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jenkins remarked
that ‘until recently, cultural studies has said little about the politics of
the child, […] seeing childhood as banal and transparent, as without
any concealed meanings of the sort that ideological critics might exca-
vate, as without any political agency of the kinds that ethnographers of
subcultures document, as without any sexuality that queer and feminist
critics might investigate’ (1998: 2). Over the course of the last decade,
however, both Argentine cinema and Latin American film more gener-
ally have turned to the child protagonist to explore a plethora of con-
temporary social and political concerns. These include, most notably for
the present discussion, the representation of recent dictatorial violence,
through films such as Marcelo Piñeyro’s Kamchatka (Argentina, 2002),
Andrés Wood’s Machuca (Chile, 2004) and Cao Hamburger’s O ano em
que meus pais saíram de férias (Brazil, 2006). Working some thirty years
after the films’ narrated events, these directors present their often semi-
autobiographical child protagonists as a means not only of laying claim
to an era that plays such a collectively formative role in contemporary
society, but also of nuancing dominant cultural representations of these
recent dictatorial pasts through the creativity and ingenuity of the child’s
gaze. As Karen Lury writes in The Child in Film,
It is not just the content of the past – what was seen, what happened when
– that is challenged by the nature of childhood, but also the framework
within which these events are interpreted: conventions as to how ‘history’
should be told, or criteria which dictate what events will be important in
the future and should therefore be included. (2010: 110)
The two films discussed in this chapter, Benjamín Ávila’s Infancia clan-
destina (2011) and Paula Markovitch’s El premio (2011), both rely on
this narrative potential of childhood suggested by Lury; the cinematic
narration of the past through the eyes of a child allows each director to
challenge conventional representations of left-wing militancy and ena-
bles the spectator to view such experiences through a new critical lens.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
4 HIJOS GUERRILLEROS: CHILDHOOD … 135
Indeed, while, as Rita de Grandis maintains, the examples mentioned

above—Kamchatka, Machuca and O ano em que meus pais saíram de
férias—‘favour a moral universalizing rendition of traumatic political
experiences over a more historical and complex treatment of the effects
and intelligibility of those political situations’ (2011: 250), the increased
sense of agency attributed to the principal child protagonist in Infancia
clandestina and El premio allows for a significantly more nuanced his-
torical and political reading of these traumatic pasts. By understanding
agency in Allison James’ terms, as inscribed when ‘the child becomes
involved in social relations and activities of different kinds and is thus
positioned, foremost, as a social actor’ (2009: 38), and ‘does something
with other people and, in so doing, makes things happen, thereby con-
tributing to wider processes of social and cultural reproduction’ (41),
this chapter considers the innovative processes of rehistoricisation and
repoliticisation that are carried out by the ‘agential’ child protagonists in
these two films.
4.1 Part One: Militancy, Memory and Make-Believe:

Politicising Childhood in Infancia clandestina
In Witnesses of War, a study of children’s lives under the Nazi regime,
Nicholas Stargardt writes: ‘Children were neither just the mute and trau-
matized witnesses to war, nor merely its innocent victims. They also lived
the war, played and fell in love during the war; the war invaded their
imaginations and the war raged inside of them’ (2005: 17). Stargardt’s
assertion also holds true for the twelve-year-old protagonist of Infancia
clandestina, whose experience as the son of active left-wing militants in
the 1970s affords viewers a realistic insight into the effects that public
militancy had on the domestic sphere during Argentina’s Dirty War.
Though the full historical reality of the era may, at first, lie beyond the
twelve-year-old’s curbed understanding, Juan2 is not presented in the
course of the film as merely a passive victim of his parents’ militancy
but as an actor in his own right, playing and falling in love, as Stargardt
writes, and progressively exerting an increasing degree of agency as he
negotiates the problematic infringements of his parents’ militancy into
almost every aspect of his life. Through the particularity of the child’s
gaze, Benjamín Ávila delves into Argentina’s national past, reconstruct-
ing the fragments of his own personal history through a lens firmly
positioned in his present adult position as a child of the disappeared.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
136 G. Maguire
Indeed, while David Martin-Jones maintains in his discussion of films by

Argentina’s second generation that ‘[t]he child seer represents someone
at once politically powerless, and yet with a remarkable capacity for his-
torical (hind)sight’ (2011: 70), it is precisely this ‘remarkable capacity’ to
re-examine the past which triggers an appropriation of political subjectiv-
ity in Infancia clandestina. The figure of the child must, therefore, be
understood not simply as a passive—though effective—spectator but as
a more complex agent, formatively shaped, as Lury asserts, ‘by the adult
[director]’s knowingness and retrospective understanding’ (2010: 109).
In The Child in Film, Lury notes that while ‘[t]he child figure does
not, or cannot, provide the authority on the facts of war, the represen-
tation of its experience as visceral, as of and on the body, demonstrates
how the interweaving of history, memory and witness can be powerfully
affective’ (2010: 7). By drawing parallels in this way between the intui-
tive, subjective nature of the child’s gaze and the film’s aesthetic modes
of expression, Infancia clandestina—and particularly the techniques
used by Ávila in the animated sequences of the film—are acutely effec-
tive in visually representing both the act of memory itself and, more
specifically, the creativity involved in the postmemorial narration of the
past. Therefore, as the conventional divisions between Juan’s public
and private worlds are transgressed and as politics and violence become
swiftly embedded within the familial environment, Infancia clandestina
not only functions as a powerful insight into the historical era in ques-
tion and as a forceful indictment of the effects this militancy had on the
domestic sphere, but also as a means of reconfiguring our understand-
ings of the creativity of the postmemorial process and the child’s rela-
tionship to it. By choosing to narrate Infancia clandestina through the
eyes of Juan, and by celebrating the potential and richness of the boy’s
imagination, Ávila thus moves beyond restrictive depictions of the child
protagonist as solely a prism for exploring the mediated and fragmentary
nature of memory. It is Juan who becomes the primary creative agent in
the transmission of these cultural memories; in this way, Infancia clan-
destina thus calls for an increased understanding of the period and its
representations through memory, and affords the young protagonist a
greater sense of political and social agency than would otherwise be asso-
ciated with the realm of childhood.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
4.1.1 Hijos guerrilleros

As Paul H. Lewis writes in his study of 1970s militancy in Argentina,
‘Being a revolutionary presupposed a total commitment: a complete sac-
rifice of one’s private life to the cause. Friends, family, job—all had to be
expendable. […] To liberate the nation was a glorious cause worth any
cost’ (2002: 33). Indeed, throughout Infancia clandestina, as the young
protagonist attends school or plays with friends, his vulnerable position
as a dependent of active militants surfaces as a source of constant threat,
precluding any sense of normality for the day-to-day life that he leads.
Though the narrative is periodically punctuated by episodes otherwise
associated with childhood—a poignant first dance at the boy’s twelfth
birthday party, for example, or a peaceful family picnic in a local park—
these brief interludes do not succeed in rescuing any traditional sense
of a secure and conventional childhood; they are, conversely, only spo-
radic emphases of just how far any sense of normality has been removed
from the perilously adult life that Juan is living. The demands of mili-
tancy, specifically Montonero activism in this case, were extensive and, as
the film convincingly shows, they effectively supplanted any familial or
personal responsibilities within the wider context of ideological obliga-
tion. ‘Militancy, in that era, was an everyday thing, it wasn’t just a fleet-
ing idea’, the director explains in an interview: ‘It was a constant state.
Working, studying, talking, catching the bus, everything had to do with
a way of seeing life and of living it, because there was total faith that
what they were doing was really changing the world’ (Ávila cit. Torres
2012). In Sobre la violencia revolucionaria, Hugo Vezzetti also com-
ments on this aspect of Montonero ideology, focusing his attention on
‘la configuración subjetiva y moral que funda una comunidad de guer-
reros: la “confraternidad del peligro”, la experiencia de un éxtasis en el
que se pierde el yo en la unión con los camaradas, los lazos primarios de
lealtad, en fin, la capacidad del sacrificio personal que vence la muerte
individual en la donación a la vida del grupo’ (the subjective and moral
configuration that founded a community of fighters: the ‘fraternity of
danger’, the experience of an ecstasy in which the individual was lost in
the joining together with his comrades, all linked first and foremost by
loyalty, by the capacity, in the end, of personal sacrifice and of forgoing
one’s own life for the life of the group) (2009: 132). Infancia clandes-
tina provides a particularly original cinematic insight into this exclusion-
ary dedication to militancy, presenting a more realistic representation of
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
138 G. Maguire
the domestic effects of militancy than other similar productions, which,

as Julia Tuñón and Tzvi Tal conclude, largely ‘represent[an] un pasado
de “buenos y malos” primando una visión idílica y despolitizada de la
sociedad’ (represent a past defined by “good and evil”, prioritising an
idyllic, depoliticised vision of society) (2007: 666).3 Indeed, as the par-
ents repeatedly neglect their familial duties and focus instead on dis-
cussing strategies, distributing munitions and organising propaganda
material, it is twelve-year-old Juan who is left to nurse, feed and, during
the most violent episodes of the film, protect his younger sister.
While Marcelo Piñeyro’s Kamchatka (2002) was criticised both for
its reluctance to convey the true impact of Montonero ideology on the
family unit and for its romanticised, dehistoricised treatment of mid-
dle-class militancy, which ‘[p]or momentos puede parecer que la visión
que tiene el film de aquellos años es quizás excesivamente idílica’ (at
times offered a potentially excessively idyllic perspective towards the
era) (Monteagudo 2002), Ávila’s portrayal of his parents’ actions both
before and during their return to Argentina persuasively paints a more
complicated picture of such intense political engagement. Rather than
the ‘tibia militancia política’ (lukewarm political militancy) (Tuñón and
Tal 2007: 666) of Kamchatka, which effectively ‘infantiliza la memo-
ria y despolitiza la historia’ (infantilises memory and depoliticises his-
tory) (666), Ávila portrays this violence in a much more explicit manner,
underlining the historical specificity and sheer intensity of the aggression
right from the outset as specific dates and historical references overlay
the film’s opening scene. As this initial episode reaches its violent apo-
gee and Juan’s father is injured in a drive-by shooting, the film switches
to comic-strip animation and we see both father and son lying on the
pavement, blood flowing from the former and urine from the latter.
While the aesthetic importance of these animated episodes will be dis-
cussed in more detail later, it is worth noting at this point that the strong
red (blood) and yellow (urine) colours—set against what are otherwise
largely monochrome sequences—become, respectively, motifs both for
the fear the boy increasingly experiences and for the violence and pain
that come to characterise this traumatic intergenerational legacy. In The
Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch uses a similar metaphor in
her discussion of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, contending that, in narratives
of postmemory, the ‘loss of family, of home, of a feeling of belonging
and safety in the world “bleed” from one generation to the next’ (2012:
34). Indeed, while these two colours recurringly appear during the most
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
violent episodes of Infancia clandestina, it is in this initial episode, with

the dates of important events concerning the military dictatorship flash-
ing on screen as the camera slowly circles in on the two fluids flowing
into one another, that the film’s problematic core is graphically—in both
senses of the word—brought to the fore. Against a clearly Argentine set-
ting of Ford Falcons and references to Perón, Juan, terrified and having
lost any ‘feeling of belonging and safety in the world’, must negotiate
the history that ‘bleeds’ from his father’s generation and come to terms
with a problematic heritage that is, as the film insists, a direct result of his
parent’s persistent dedication to political militancy.
In an early episode of the film, when Juan starts a fight with a fel-
low pupil after refusing to raise the flag at a school assembly, the extent
to which this adult world of politics has contaminated his life becomes
evident. Having been accused by his classmate of not knowing ‘cómo
ser patriota’ (how to be patriotic), he explains to his uncle the reasons
for not wishing to raise the flag: ‘Tiene sol. Es la bandera de guerra, la
excusa de los milicos. […] Tendrían que tener la que no es de guerra,
la que es celeste y blanca […] Belgrano ¡Eso!’ (That one’s got the sun
on it. It’s their flag, the milicos’ flag. […] They should raise the other
one that doesn’t belong to them, what’s it called again? […] Exactly!
Belgrano).4 While this scene attests to the child’s assimilation of the
vocabulary of militancy, the ensuing exchange between uncle and
nephew points to a much greater incorporation of Montonero ideology
into the boy’s life. As the situation is resolved, both characters privately
assume a highly formal—albeit tinged with humour—manner of speech,
echoing similar conversations previously overheard in the film between
the boy’s father and other lower-ranked militants:
Tío Beto: ¿Y vos cómo te llamás en la escuela?

Juan: Ernesto.
TB: ¿Y entonces?
J: Sí, tenés razón.
TB: ¿Cómo dijo?
J: Tenés razón.
TB: ¿Cómo dijo, soldado?
J [en posición de firmes]: ¡Tiene razón mi coronel!
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140 G. Maguire
TB: Y ahora a lustrar.

[Tío Beto: And what’s your name when you’re in school?
Juan: Ernesto.
TB: So…?
J: Yea, I suppose you’re right.
TB: [Moving to the third-person formal form of address] What did
you say?
J: Yea, you’re right.
TB: What did you say, soldier?
J [standing to attention]: Affirmative, Sir!
TB: That’s better, soldier. Now get back to polishing.]
As the film cuts to the child polishing a pair of shoes as punishment,

the influence of militancy on the child’s world is clear: this is not simply
a minor or sporadic infringement into the realm of childhood normality,
but a complete infiltration of the domestic sphere and a complication of
every social relationship the boy attempts to negotiate.
As the film, in this way, effectively creates a convincing atmosphere
of a quotidian, normalised exposure to violence in the life of the young
protagonist, opposition to such militancy is perhaps at its most explicit
through the character of Juan’s grandmother, Amalia. When the elderly
woman is delivered undercover and blindfolded to the casa operativa
shortly before the boy’s birthday party,5 she criticises her daughter for
returning to Argentina at such a politically volatile time and begs both
parents to let her take care of the children. ‘“¿A vos te parece normal
que un chico tiene el nombre de no sé quién, un cumpleaños en no sé
qué fecha, de no se sabe quién?”, she argues, “Pobre pollito, esto no es
normal. ¡Tus hijos no son guerrilleros, no son guerrilleros!’ (Does it seem
normal to you that the boy has the name of God-knows-who, or a birth-
day on a random date, stolen from some stranger? The poor little thing,
it just isn’t normal for him. Your children aren’t fighters [hijos guerril-
leros]! They’re not fighters, I’m telling you!)’. To be sure, while the film
sporadically appears to offer a favourable view of the Montonero move-
ment, both structurally and functionally through its methodical hierar-
chy and strong sense of camaraderie, the figure of the grandmother in
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this ‘escena troncal’ (pivotal scene) (Ávila cit. Ranzani 2012) succeeds in
unambiguously vocalising the harmful impact this militancy had on the
children of political militants. As Emilio Crenzel asserts in his key study
of the Nunca más report, the consequences of left-wing activism were
largely excluded from political and cultural discourses during the post-
dictatorship period, which opted instead to ignore the collateral militari-
sation of the domestic sphere and cast militants primarily as ‘victims’ of
the military regime’s brutality. He writes:
In the presentation of the disappeared [in Nunca más], all reference to

their political activism was omitted, and any description of their commit-
ments in terms of heroism or martyrdom was avoided and replaced by a
depiction based on the particulars that identified them as individuals (such
as their gender and age), the use of general categories in which they were
included (such as their nationality, their religious beliefs, and their occu-
pation or profession), and by reference to the moral values they held. All
of these categories restored the humanity that the disappeared had been
stripped of, highlighted the broad and indiscriminate nature of the vio-
lence perpetrated by the ‘terrorist state’ and the ‘innocence’ of its victims.
(2012: 27)
Significantly, as Crenzel later contends of Nunca más, ‘Thus, the

report performs simultaneously two operations: by presenting the dis-
appeared as subjects of law it gives a new political significance to their
identity that contrasts with the perspective of the dictatorship; and, at
the same time, it renders them apolitical by positing them as innocent
victims and excluding their activism’ (2012: 82, emphasis in original).
Infancia clandestina, then, represents one of the most recent examples
from the Argentine cultural sphere to repoliticise the experiences and
actions of the previous generation, portraying them and their militancy
in a much more complex manner than before: that is, as highly organ-
ised and well armed militants, who were capable of skilled paramilitary
attacks. Moreover, within this context of dictatorial repression, the film
also poignantly portrays the extreme domestic danger that the depend-
ents of these militants faced on a daily basis.
It must be noted, however, that while the film does indeed criticise
the previous generation’s militancy, it is not their fundamental politi-
cal choices that are condemned, but their sustained militancy despite the
consequences on their children. Ávila has defended his parents’ politics
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142 G. Maguire
on numerous occasions, arguing that ‘[o]bviamente, visto desde el hoy

hay una sensación de ingenuidad, pero porque sabemos que se aniquiló
toda esa idea’ (obviously, from today’s perspective, there’s a sense of
naivety, but that’s because we know that the whole idea was absolutely
crushed) (Torres 2012) and, in a different context, that ‘la militancia no
es sinónimo de muerte sino sinónimo de creer’ (militancy is not synony-
mous with dying; it’s synonymous with believing) (Ranzani 2012). In
this sense, the loss of security that Juan experiences as a direct result of
the incursion of his parents’ public militancy, is, on a broader level, rep-
resentative of more nuanced generational issues of cultural memory. As
Ana Ros asserts in her study of the post-dictatorship generation in the
Southern Cone,
[T]he children of the desaparecidos find themselves dealing with their par-
ents’ double condition as both family and public symbols of revolution
and justice, which responds to a larger series of dichotomies: affect/poli-
tics, emotions/intellect, private/public. Within this framework, agreeing
with their parent’s political project seems to imply repressing painful feelings
of abandonment and melancholy about a stolen past. Conversely, express-
ing those emotions seems to imply an opposition to their parents’ struggle. This
perspective interferes with the process of mourning and the possibility of
imagining a life that, though different from their parents’, is still meaning-
ful. (2012: 31, my emphasis)
Interestingly, while Ros quite accurately calls attention to the wider

intergenerational issues that are borne out of the previous generation’s
political choices, the resultant conflict she proposes between an unspoken
personal condemnation of this past and an explicit, outspoken judgement
of such militancy fails, in many respects, to move beyond the language of
dependency and trauma—it is, for Ávila, and many of his generation, the
third option of scrutinising his parents’ militancy and, at the same time,
creating a separate and distinct notion of political agency in the present
that fuels the narrative of Infancia clandestina. In this sense, Ros lim-
its the perspectives of the children of desaparecidos to a dichotomy that
fails to grasp the wider complexities of contemporary Argentine society,
relegating the post-dictatorship generation’s varied political stances to
restrictive notions of intergenerational dependency. As previously dis-
cussed, while critics of this generation focus largely on the transmission
of trauma between and within generations, suggesting, as Cecilia Sosa
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has done, that ‘the bloodline assembly of victims has commanded the
experience of mourning […], transforming the local landscape of mem-
ory struggles into a family issue’ (2014: 1), the primacy and significance
of the contemporary political critique of this shared past remain largely
unacknowledged. The confusion over identity in Infancia clandestina,
for example, which critics such as Gonzalo Aguilar have claimed provide
the ‘traumatic, threatening remains’ (2013: 21) for later adult anxie-
ties over identity, is, as the director attests, simply—although not insig-
nificantly—part of the childhood experience: ‘For a child, this world [of
false identities] isn’t complex or strange. It’s normal’ (Torres 2012). It is
such an emphasis on psychoanalytic interpretations of what are, for Ávila,
simply conventional parts of negotiating an identity that obscures the
film’s political potential. It is, therefore, not between notions of ‘schiz-
ophrenia and anonymity’ (Aguilar 2013: 20) that the understanding of
Infancia clandestina’s child protagonist may be as its most productive,
but through an appreciation of the political significance of the child-
hood negotiation of militancy. Indeed, by presenting a more nuanced
and rehistoricised representation of the previous generation’s place in
Argentine history through the eyes of Juan, the boy is thus endowed
with an independent sense of social and political agency, reflecting a
broader generational desire to transcend the position as passive victim in
a history understood to be, melancholically, beyond their control.
4.1.2 Playing in Public

‘Chango, ¿te acordás de aquello que te conté, cuando el Che se fue de
Cuba?”, asks Juan’s father in a voice-over at the beginning of the film:
“Me habías hecho unos dibujos de eso, preciosos, todavía los tengo.
Bueno, ahora vos vas a hacer algo parecido a lo que hizo el Che. […]
Hermosito, ésa es tu misión’ (Kiddo, do you remember when I told
you about the time Che [Guevara] left Cuba? You drew me some bril-
liant pictures of that, really beautiful drawings, I still have them. Well,
now you’re going to have to do something similar to what Che did. […]
Kiddo, this is your mission). At the outset of Infancia clandestina, the
events surrounding the parents’ militancy are, in this way, presented to
Juan as a game, with the individual members of the family having their
own separate parts to play to ensure the well-being of the entire house-
hold. As the credits roll and hand-drawn children’s pictures detail the
story of Che Guevara’s return to Argentina (Fig. 4.1), emphasising the
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
144 G. Maguire
humorous elements of his disguise, the gravity of Juan’s mission and the
violent atmosphere that the twelve-year old is entering is only momen-
tarily veiled behind this façade of play; when the fake family is ques-
tioned by Argentine border police,6 the voice-over suddenly assumes
a more serious tone: ‘Esto no tenés que repetirlo nunca’, instructs his
mother, ‘lo tenés que saber bien seguro, no te olvides: Ya no sos Juan,
ahora sos Ernesto’ (You must never repeat this. You need to remember
it, and never forget it: you’re not Juan now, you’re Ernesto) Burdened
with the preservation of an entirely new identity and becoming gradu-
ally more complicit with his parents’ cover story, the child protagonist’s
private realm of play quickly becomes a very real entrance into the adult
world of public militancy. What begins as a joke among family members,
for example, when Juan first arrives in Argentina and is asked to recite
his new fabricated life story, comically disguised in his mother’s scarf and
father’s glasses and struggling to mask his Cuban accent, rather swiftly
develops into a considerably more serious matter—by the end of the
film, we hear Juan austerely reciting the same cover story as he is force-
fully interrogated in the basement of a military detention centre, his par-
ents and younger sister having been already disappeared.
As Sharon Stephens affirms in Children and the Politics of Culture,
‘Play requires some measure of physical safety, or at least the possibil-
ity of dangers selectively and voluntarily undertaken. The imagined
boundaries of play worlds should not be subject to sudden, violent dis-
ruptions from adult society. Play requires some measure of consistent
Fig. 4.1 Infancia clandestina, dir. by Benjamín Ávila
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adult guidelines and protection’ (1995: 33). In Infancia clandestina, the

childish predilection towards playing that Juan exhibits at the beginning
of the film is swiftly exploited by the adults in the execution of their ali-
ases—this world of play is, for Juan, consistently not protected by adults’
actions, but rather rendered wholly insecure by their decision to return
to Argentina and ‘continue with [their] fight’. Even during the few short
episodes that, to all intents and purposes, seem to portray the boy living
as a normal child, visual parallels between Juan’s supposed world of play
and the violence and danger of real life are subtly presented on-screen,
intimating that the reality of his parents’ militancy is never far away. For
example, when fellow Montonero militants are ushered into the family’s
home, blindfolded to avoid any recognition of where the casa operativa
is located, almost the same scene is played out later in the film between
Juan and his friends during a game of Blind Man’s Bluff (Fig. 4.2,
Fig. 4.3). Subsequently, when Juan runs away from his parents and takes
his girlfriend on a trip, the shooting games at a funfair anticipate later
scenes when Juan will use his father’s gun for real, some moments before
his parents’ abduction; gravely, the teddy bears at stake at the fairground
are replaced with both the boy’s own life and the life of his younger sister.
In ‘Cinematic Experience: Film, Space and the Child’s World’,
Annette Kuhn draws specific attention to the cinematic treatment of
childhood memories, writing,
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146 G. Maguire
One of the most distinctive features of cinema’s organization of space

within the frame, and of its play of stasis and movement is its capacity to
express and evoke – at the levels of feeling and memory – highly invested
objects, spaces and passages, in particular those which have to do with the
task of negotiating inner and outer worlds. (2010a: 96)
During one of the film’s several significant dream sequences, which

appear as prime examples of Kuhn’s ‘highly invested’ passages, Juan finds
himself witnessing his own mock funeral, watching as his schoolmates
stand around his body, singing and reciting the Montoneros’ tradi-
tional tribute to fallen militants.7 ‘El compañero Ernesto’, declares each
child in turn, before replying in unison: ‘¡Presente!’ (Comrade Ernesto.
Present!). The scene is linked quite explicitly to an earlier school excur-
sion through both the children’s costumes and their choice of song, pre-
senting a striking visual contrast between the boy’s dead body and the
joviality of the children, and retrospectively tainting one of the few short
episodes in the film where Juan comes closest to a care-free and peace-
ful childhood. However, just as he was harshly torn from the normal-
ity of his brief school trip by the news of his uncle’s death, here we see
another element of Juan’s childhood die in a much more literal sense:
as the boy’s dead body lies on a table, his girlfriend dressed in black and
crying, his parallel presence as the spectator of his own sombre—yet
childish—funeral reinforces his adult concerns over identity. As the cam-
era pans across his body, the viewer witnesses a surreal twist in which his
head is replaced with a TV screen, flickering between the ‘wanted’ image
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of his father that will be seen later on the national news and the photo-
graph of the anonymous child in Juan’s counterfeit passport (Fig. 4.4).
Significantly, we are drawn into this oneiric sequence through the boy’s
bedroom window. As Kuhn asserts,
Liminal spaces in and around the home – windows and doors, especially
– may exert an attraction in that they allow the child to be in closed and
open spaces at the same time, at once secure and ‘going exploring’. […]
Then, as the sense of being a separate individual develops, so does the need
for a variety of spaces, and so does a proprietary feeling toward such
spaces. Because of their developmental significance, the home’s edges – its
boundaries and its borders between inner and outer, its thresholds – may
lastingly assume special emotional and imaginational weight. (2010a: 86,
my emphasis)
This dream sequence—itself occurring significantly in the in-between

space of the garage, outside the home yet not quite in public—accu-
rately conveys the difficulties inherent in the triangulation of identity
that the young protagonist is experiencing, straining to negotiate his
father’s militancy (represented by the ‘wanted’ poster), the alias that
has been created for him (metonymically embodied in the fake pass-
port photograph), and his own genuine identity, alluded to here when
his schoolmates use his real name for the first time. Furthermore, the
significance and timing of this scene is crucial, for it is through this
explicit problematisation of the boy’s identity, moments before his
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148 G. Maguire
parents’ arrest, that the viewer witnesses the climax of this developing
‘sense of being a separate individual’. Indeed, just as Lury stresses that
children ‘want and they act, and they should therefore be considered
agents as well as subjects’ (2005: 308), here Ávila exerts a new relation
to the past we see reconstructed on screen, manipulating the ‘uncon-
scious processes, fantasies, anxiety [and] symbolization’ of Juan’s play
in order to achieve a ‘new relation to external reality’ (Treacher 2000:
139). It is this reality, far from the childish play worlds of make-believe
and disguise and, instead, active in the very real adult world of mili-
tancy, which Juan is forced to negotiate as a child of left-wing mili-
tants.
When Juan and his girlfriend run away from home to spend the day at
a theme park, a conversation between the two children gestures towards
the distinct societal position that Juan occupies, deprived of the nor-
malcy of childhood and largely disconnected from his contemporaries:
Juan: Te tengo que confesar algo, lo siento muy fuerte acá en la panza.
[…] Mirá, hay cosas que no entendés y esto está bien y otras cosas que
todavía no vas a entender, ¿entendés?
María: [Sacude la cabeza]
J: Sí, no sé explicarlo muy bien, pero lo que siento por vos es de verdad.
Mirá, te recuerdo cuando me dijiste que yo era diferente a los demás,
bueno es eso. Yo soy quien vos crees que soy, pero diferente… ¿Entendés?
M: No entiendo nada de lo que decís, pero sos lindo igual.
[Juan: I have to confess something to you, something I feel deep down in

my stomach. […] Look, there are things that you don’t understand, and
that’s fine, and there are other things that you’re not going to understand.
Does that make sense?
María: [Shakes head]
J: Yea, I don’t know how to explain it, but what I feel for you is real.
Look, remember when you told me that I was different from the other
boys? Well, that’s it. I am who you think I am, just different… Do you
understand now?
M: I don’t understand anything you’re saying, but you’re still cute.]
While the desire to run away from home may be considered a conven-
tional stage of any adolescent experience, this conversation, along with
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the considerable amount of money that Juan has stolen from his parents’
embute, points to the more complex political challenges the boy must
now face. Furthermore, with the whole scene crucially unfolding in the
funfair’s House of Mirrors, Juan’s preoccupations with his own identity
are paralleled in the numerous reflections we see on screen (Fig. 4.5); the
difficulty in identifying the many images of Juan, along with his cryp-
tic conversation, stresses both the various adult roles he must play in
his parents’ public world of militancy, but also—significantly—the frag-
mented and confusing nature of legacy that this militancy now exerts
on any present sense of identity. By presenting the figure of the child in
such a way, caught between contrasting identities yet, at the same time,
surpassing traditional attitudes of the child as incapable of independent
thought, Infancia clandestina thus unveils the director’s desire to assume
an active position in the reconstruction of both his own personal identity,
painting a more complex picture of the effects of militancy and refusing
to remain an unresponsive, infantile spectator in this history.
4.1.3 Comics, Kids and Cinematic Consciousness

Interestingly, during the three most violent episodes of the film, Ávila
chooses to switch the realist narration to comic-strip animations, a strat-
egy which has two principal effects on the viewer—firstly, these scenes
accentuate Juan’s position as the protagonist of the film, using a medium
so often related to childhood and to children, and thus emphasising
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150 G. Maguire
the childhood gaze; and secondly, the sequences also effectively draw
attention to the subjective nature of the act of remembering and under-
line the mediated and creative character of these very personal explo-
rations into the director’s past. As Aguilar asserts in his article on the
film, this recourse to the ‘non-indexical par excellence: the cartoon […]
should not be underestimated, as it is not merely another part of the
film’ (2013: 26). Indeed, as this discussion will illustrate, despite their
climactic appearance at times when the on-screen violence is at its most
intense,8 these episodes neither gesture towards the traumatic unassimila-
bility of such flagrant breaches of conventional childhood innocence nor
represent a means of exposing the subjective fissures in collective mem-
ory as inherently restrictive. Instead, by using these episodes to fuse the
boy’s own recollections with situations and events he factually could not
have experienced, these comic-strip animations reveal the foundational
subjectivity in any attempt to recuperate the past and, subsequently, cele-
brate the creativity and imagination of the postmemorial process at work
in Juan’s memories.
In her work on autobiography and fiction, Carolyn Steedman reminds
us that the present exerts a powerful influence on the attempt to recon-
stitute childhood experience:
History offers us the fantasy that it may be found; that out of all the bits
and pieces left behind, the past may be reconstructed, conjured before the
eyes: found. Childhood – the idea of childhood – on the other hand, may
tell us that the search is futile (though it may be necessary and sometimes
compulsive); tells us that the lost object is not to be found, for the very
search for the past in each of us changes the past as we go along, so that the
lost thing is not the same now as it was before. (1992: 12)
This shifting approach to the meanings of the past is made explicit in a

particularly significant episode of the film, in which Juan imaginatively
recreates his uncle’s death during a failed paramilitary operation. As the
story is visibly reconstructed on screen, with the overt sequencing of dis-
parate comic-strip images, Tío Beto’s death is played out in numerous
permutations. It is a strategy that reflects the ‘futility’ of searching for
one cohesive testimony of what went wrong and, instead, assimilates all
shards and strands of information into one dialogic, heterogeneous nar-
rative. Moreover, the boy’s appropriation of his father’s glasses in this
scene emphasises the former’s pivotal position as the seeing subject and
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
witness of the film, the subjective lens through which we, as viewers, gain
access to the story of Infancia clandestina.9 Significantly, this episode
takes place moments after the boy’s parents explain to him how his uncle
had died, and so the images we see in the animations, therefore, are not
the boy’s own memories—and objectively could not be—but those of
his parents and their compañeros, appropriated and reconditioned to vari-
ous degrees through the boy’s imagination. As Lury notes, ‘The quali-
ties of childhood experience, which is narcissistic, fragmented, temporally
chaotic, often contextless, are counter to the demands of the conven-
tional narratives of history, which construct an omniscient and chrono-
logical perspective, thereby producing comprehensible, coherent stories
informed by cause and effect’ (2010: 110).
These comic-strip sequences not only reflect on how the past, and
the memory of the past, may be represented cinematically, but they also
offer an interesting critique of how ‘the conventional narratives of his-
tory’ have portrayed the dictatorship and its repression, drawing atten-
tion to the clichéd images and caricature-like depictions of the military
within Argentine culture. While the animated sequences admittedly
include the most publicly recognisable symbols of the era—Ford Falcons,
cyanide pills, military officers, escondites—they do, however, reveal a
more problematic interaction between the public and private spheres,
interlacing various personal and unconnected memories from earlier in
the film, such as the recurring image of his girlfriend, María, during a
dance rehearsal, with less intimate, public images, such as those of Che
Guevara’s death. On the film’s release, the critic Eduardo Levy Yeyati
wrote:
Pero la tragedia se aligera porque en los tiroteos y las muertes, los fotogra-
mas se convierten en cuadros de historieta, y así quedan congelados como
hechos de una historia que no se cuestiona. Típico de la época K[irchner],
la historieta define lo público, lo verdadero y lo definitivo, mientras que
para el cine queda lo privado, lo ficcional, lo interpretable: los asuntos
menores. (2012, my emphasis)
[The tragedy is, however, softened, given that the frames change to comic-
book stills during the shootouts and killings, frozen as unquestionable facts
of the story. Typical of the K[irchner] era, the comic defines the public, the
true, the definitive parts of the story, while the cinematic realm is kept for
the private, the fictional and the interpretable: the minor details]
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152 G. Maguire
In Infancia clandestina, however, the distinctions between these two

modes of narration are much more complex than Yeyati argues: not
only do the comic-strip sequences represent some of the most subjec-
tive and personal episodes of the film, but they also effectively emphasise
the boy’s gaze as a means of problematising and questioning the clichéd
nature of existing narratives. It is, therefore, through the form and con-
tent of these animations that the film is able both to interrogate homog-
enised cultural perceptions of the dictatorial past, complicating pervasive
and Manichean societal notions of good and evil, and, consequently, to
present the creativity and vibrancy of the boy’s subjective, private experi-
ence as a means of exposing such problematic public narratives and mov-
ing beyond their restrictive understanding. Sarah Thomas discusses this
aspect of Infancia clandestina’s incorporation of ‘graphic violence’ into
its narrative, writing that not only do these episodes ‘reject the idea of a
complete recuperation of or immersion in the recreated past’, but they
also ‘refuse the spectator a comfortable position from which to consume
or fetishize the past [they] depict’ (2015: 252). Indeed, rather than a
reflection of the inability Juan experiences in comprehending this intense
violence, these comic strip sequences surface as the boy’s personal per-
spective towards negotiating such loss: a postmemorial exploration of
memory that creatively transcends both the traumatic repetition and
objective inconsistencies of the past, and instead offers a constructive
approach that celebrates the Juan’s imagination in negotiating the his-
torical ellipses of his past.
The decision to recount these episodes in the film through the comic,
with a lack of dialogue and an emphasis on the pictorial, capitalises on
the visuality of the cinematic medium and its inherent capacity to reflect
upon the intrinsically disjointed and imagistic nature of memory itself.
Despite the distinct discontinuity between the animated episodes and
the more realist narration in the rest of the film, Ávila’s emphasis on the
pictorial, intensified by extra-diegetic music and a shift towards a cha-
otic, largely unordered narrative stream of stills, hyperbolically empha-
sises the cinematic emphasis on the visual. In Childhood and Cinema,
Vicky Lebeau writes, ‘Small children have many more perceptions than
they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much
richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt,
their at all producible, vocabulary’ (2008: 16); an appropriate assertion,
in this case, given that the sequences appear when the violence is at its
most incomprehensible for the young protagonist. As Lebeau continues,
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it is thanks, therefore, to the sensory specificities of the medium of film

that the viewer may gain a deeper understanding of the nature and sig-
nificance of the childhood experience: ‘[W]hen it comes to the rep-
resentation of the child’, she writes, ‘cinema, with its privileged access
to the perceptual, its visual and aural richness, would seem to have the
advantage: closer to perception, it can come closer to the child’ (16).
Indeed, while recent studies in post-dictatorship cinema in Argentina,
and elsewhere in Latin America, have generally understood the child’s
central position in films about state violence as a paradigm for explor-
ing the unrepresentability of trauma, and for an explicit denunciation of
the weaknesses of memory in the construction of an authentic experience
of the past, Infancia clandestina here posits a more productive under-
standing of the child protagonist. By exploiting the integral visuality of
cinema, these animated sequences highlight the medium’s potential to
express not the inherent gaps in the postmemorial narration of the past,
but the richness and vibrancy of the child’s reiteration of such intense
and formative memories.
In this way, the formal aspects of Ávila’scomic-book sequences thus
become reflective of the film’s own complex engagement with mem-
ory. Kuhn explains, in her discussion of performances of memory in
visual media, that ‘the metaphoric quality, the foregrounding of formal
devices, the tendency to rapid shifts of setting or point of view all feed
into the characteristically collagist, fragmentary, timeless, even the “musi-
cal”, quality of the memory text, which by and large possesses an imag-
istic quality that aligns it more closely to unconscious productions likes
dreams and fantasies than to, say, written stories’ (2010b: 299). By prob-
lematising Juan’s individual—yet dialogic—process of remembering in
this way, Infancia clandestina’s performance as a self-reflexive ‘memory
text’, with its ‘imagistic qualities’ and fragmentary modes of narration,
thus goes much further than solely exposing cinema’s inherent visual
capacity to foreground the subjectivity of memory. For Russell Kilbourn,
in Cinema, Memory, Modernity, the ability of modern technologies to
reproduce the past in such vivid forms has led memory to become ‘de-
ontologized’, whereby we understand its substance as now fundamen-
tally artificial, ‘constituted, legitimized and “naturalized” through and
by means of primary visual media, most significantly cinema’ (2010: 6).
Though Kilbourn recognises that these problems of memory predate the
young medium of cinema, he suggests that as the pre-eminent mode of
narration in the twentieth century ‘cinema is not merely one of the most
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154 G. Maguire
effective metaphors for memory but that cinema—alongside photogra-

phy—is constitutive of memory in its deepest and most meaningful sense’
(1). Rather than an expression of the traumatic inability to represent the
past faithfully, therefore, Infancia clandestina’s explicit representation of
the subjectivity of memory, and its celebration through the child’s gaze,
points not to cinema’s inability to transmit an authentic experience of
the past, but to its nature as a constituent element in both the successful
communication of vicarious experience and the construction of collective
memory.
In Technics and Time 3, the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler
delves further into the relationship between cinema and memory, stating
that ‘consciousness functions just like cinema, which has enabled cinema
(and television) to take it over’ (2011 [2001]: 77). Through the defini-
tion of cinema as a temporal object, an object, that is, not simply in time
but constituted through time and whose identity is thus inseparable from
its temporal extension, he argues that any act of perception through con-
sciousness can never simply be constituted by the act of primary reten-
tion, what he refers to as ‘the present moment’ (14) of perceiving an
object for the first time: this present moment, according to Stiegler, is
subject to, and indeed wholly reliant upon, the tailored selection and
creative investment of secondary and tertiary memories. For Stiegler,
the concept of tertiary memory is one which has been made possible by
technics of mnemotechnology, that is, the tools specifically dedicated to
the recording and transmission of experience such as writing, graphic art,
photography, painting etc., all of which allow for the prosthetic adop-
tion of memories which are not one’s own. Such prosthetic adoption is
intrinsic to human consciousness according to Stiegler and is precisely
what allows for the successful transmission of knowledge from one gen-
eration to the next. ‘Tertiary retention is in the most general sense the
prosthesis of consciousness’, he writes, ‘without which there could be no
mind, no recall, no memory of a past that one has not personally lived,
no culture’ (39).
As previously discussed, the animated sequences of Infancia clandes-
tina are able to include memories which the boy was not present for
and could, therefore, only personally know through an appropriation of
others’ recollections, available through the exteriorisation of memory of
which Stiegler speaks. In the last of the film’s three animated sequences,
for example, we see the boy witness the arrest of his parents and their
compañeros, then—occurring quite separately from what is happening
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to Juan—we see their subsequent suicide by cyanide pills in the back

of a police car: an event, in Stiegler’s terms, ‘made accessible […]
through tertiary retentions in various, more or less fragmentary, condi-
tions’ (61). Stiegler’s arguments rest on his concept of dérushage, the
idea that both cinema and consciousness necessarily contain elements
of montage, selection, imagination and the play of special effects. This
essential similarity, in turn, leads Stiegler to affirm that ‘consciousness
is already thoroughly cinematographic’ (17, emphasis in original) in its
organisation of memory, so that primary personal recollections and
their secondary recall at a later date become seamlessly intertwined
with these tertiary or imagined, prosthetic memories. In this regard,
as these comic-strip sequences destroy the film’s illusion of referen-
tiality and expose the dérushage of both cinema and consciousness
through their explicitly mediated nature, Infancia clandestina presents
a new cinematic poetics of dealing with memories of disappearance: an
often overtly fictional and self-reflexive process which recognises both
the construction of its own narration and the wider levels of creation,
mediation and prosthetic adoption inherent in the consciousness of any
remembering subject.
As memories are repeated, refashioned and appropriated in the ani-
mated sequences of Infancia clandestina, Ávila’s cinematic treatment
of the boy’s recollections proposes, as Stiegler writes, that ‘conscious-
ness is always in some fashion a montage of overlapping primary, sec-
ondary, and tertiary memories’ (2011: 27–28). Rather than presenting
the boy’s experience in the film as a prism through which we effectively
expose the fragility and failures of postmemory, the animated sequences
of Infancia clandestina instead reveal the creative and cinematographic
nature of consciousness itself. In this sense, then, the mediatisation
of cinema does not restrict the expression of Juan’s memories of the
past, uncovering their traumatic ellipses and inconsistencies, but sug-
gests these memories are enabled precisely because of cinema’s potential
to reflect and perform the fragmentary and collagistic construction of
both individual acts of memory and wider processes of cultural trans-
mission. Infancia clandestina can, therefore, be read against the grain
of dominant and reductive emphases on theories of trauma, and as a
defence of cinema as a crucial and effective tool in the creation and
communication of fresh intergenerational cultural memories—not as a
betrayal of Juan’s past, that is, but as a constituent element in its post-
memorial transmission.
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156 G. Maguire
4.1.4 Conclusion
‘In recognising incompleteness, instability, unreliability, disjointedness,
and partiality of representations to and of memory, the productive imagi-
nation ostracises the subject from a sense of knowing’, writes Jessica
Stites Mor in her study of recent Argentine cinema, focusing on debates
surrounding the medium’s capacity to represent the gaps and aporias in
the ‘imagescape’ of the past: ‘This has the potential to turn memory pol-
itics […] into a site of dispossession […], threatening to divest historical
subjects of not only past realities but also of historical agency’ (2012:
166–167). In Infancia clandestina, while the comic-strip sequences
destroy the illusion of referentiality and expose the mediated nature not
only of cinema but also of any process of remembering, Juan’s experi-
ence is not, however, presented as a means of emphasising the reduc-
tive or negatively infantile subjectivity of this postmemorial exploration
of the past. By accentuating the intrinsically visual nature of both child-
hood and the medium of cinema, and by celebrating the erratic and
fragmentary qualities of Juan’s individual acts of memory, Ávila not
only confirms the boy’s potential in providing an alternative view from
the margins of this politicised history, but also refutes the traditionally
reductive circumscription of the child’s experience as merely a space of
‘becoming [and] instability and incompleteness’ (James 2009: 35). ‘Hay
un momento en que él deja de ser niño’, affirms Ávila, ‘y Juan empieza
a tomar decisiones sobre su mundo, en vez de que el mundo sea un
proceso donde él vive’ (There is a moment in which Juan stops being a
child and he begins to take decisions about the world for himself, instead
of the world simply being a larger process in which he exists) (Ranzani
2012). While, here, Ávila regresses to the more traditional conception
of the child, asserting Juan’s resultant loss of childhood—‘stops being
a child’—when the boy becomes an agent in his own right, the experi-
ence of the domestic effects of Montonero militancy through the eyes of
the young protagonist in Infancia clandestina does, however, effectively
underscore Juan’s position as the lead protagonist of the story.
Towards the end of the film, as military personnel deliver the boy
safely to his grandmother’s house—itself an atypical break from stand-
ard representations of the military’s brutality—the final words and
images of Infancia clandestina place the focus firmly on Juan. Standing
in front of an unfamiliar door, breathing heavily and unsure if the
house does in fact belong to his grandmother, the camera returns to
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a characteristically close shot of his face. Just moments after staunchly

reciting his Montonero alias in the basement of a detention centre, the
boy then stresses his own true identity, separate from his parents’ mili-
tancy, by hesitantly uttering his name: ‘Soy Juan’ (It’s Juan). In this reas-
sertion of identity as Infancia clandestina’s very dangerous world of play
comes to an end, we therefore witness the culmination of a repoliticised
approach towards both the parents’ place in history and the child’s rela-
tionship to this past. By revealing the permeable and dialogic quality of
the interactions between childhood and adulthood, and by highlighting
mediatisation as crucial to the proper operation of both memory and
consciousness, Infancia clandestina thus restores agency to the seeing,
creative child protagonist, eschewing notions of trauma and innocence
for an increased understanding of the capacity for political and social
agency that childhood possesses.
4.2 Part Two: Domestic Politics and Prosthetic

Memory in El premio
‘Cinema’, suggests Annette Kuhn, ‘is peculiarly capable of enacting not
only the very activity of remembering, but also ways of remembering
that are commonly shared; it is therefore peculiarly capable of bringing
together personal experiences and larger systems and processes of cul-
tural memory’ (2010b: 303). Due to the affinity that Kuhn perceives
between cinematic modes of expression and the fragmentary, imagistic
and subjective processes of memory itself, she argues that the filmic text
provokes in the spectator a more profound personal engagement with
the memories presented on screen. ‘Such recognition is not necessar-
ily, nor even very importantly, of the content of the memory-story’, she
writes, ‘it is rather a recognition of remembering’s distinctive structure
of feeling; and it is enabled by the space that the memory text gives the
viewer’ (303, emphasis in original). Indeed, in Paula Markovitch’s semi-
autobiographic film El premio (2011), the cinematic treatment of the
seven-year-old child protagonist not only forces us to consider the indi-
vidual act of remembering but also interrogates the spectator’s collective
position in relation to the traumatic events presented on screen; namely,
for Cecilia and her mother, the politically unstable and imminently vio-
lent atmosphere of 1970s dictatorship Argentina. The increased sense
of agency afforded to Cecilia as she negotiates the damaging domestic
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158 G. Maguire
effects of her parents’ militancy allows the director both to facilitate and
inhibit the collectivisation of her ‘personal experiences’ within, as Kuhn
writes, the shared ‘systems and processes of cultural memory’ (303). The
appropriation of agency that takes place in El premio not only exposes
tensions surrounding the use of the child as a figure of heightened affec-
tive—and affiliative—identification, but also, more broadly, reflects the
director’s perspectives towards the position of the hijo against the back-
drop of national, institutionally co-opted narratives of cultural memory
in contemporary Argentina.
As part of a growing trend in Latin American film, El premio turns
to the director’s semi-autobiographical seven-year-old ‘self’ for the
film’s narrative impetus, recounting the story of a mother and daugh-
ter on the run after the disappearance of the child’s father. In doing so,
Markovitch offers the viewer a tensely claustrophobic representation of
the intrusion of public politics into the domestic sphere in dictatorship
Argentina. Within the private space of their wind-beaten beach dwelling
and under relentless assault from the elements, the distressing familial
tension between mother and daughter reveals a much broader intergen-
erational friction over the transmission of cultural memory in contem-
porary Argentine society. Indeed, as the domestic tensions and strained
relationship between Cecilia and her mother gradually come to domi-
nate the narrative, punctuated by numerous long and often uncomfort-
able confrontations between the two, the exploration of the social and
emotional challenges of a childhood spent in hiding effectively interro-
gates the complete incursion of public politics into the familial domain
in 1970s Argentina. The retreat of recent dictatorship-related Argentine
films, such as El premio, into the domestic sphere does not represent a
reluctance to confront political tensions, therefore, nor signify an exclu-
sionary focus on ‘minor issues’ (Levy Yeyati 2012, emphasis in origi-
nal). Instead, this retreat surfaces as a more nuanced understanding of
the complex relationship between the political and the domestic both in
the context of 1970s militancy and in the postmemorial transmission of
memory in contemporary Argentina. By obscuring traditional concep-
tions of the divisions between childhood and adulthood, and also of the
boundaries between the public and private spheres, the spectator’s lim-
ited identification with Cecilia reflects a desire on the director’s part to
draw attention to the continued pervasiveness of the public gaze into the
lives of these sons and daughters. As such, El premio becomes a means of
diversifying contemporary perceptions of the hijo within recent political
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Fig. 4.6 El premio, dir. by Paula Markovitch
and societal discourses of historical memory and victimhood, signalling

the persistent tensions between recounting these individual, personal
narrations of the past and the reluctance to allow such narratives to be
subsumed and institutionalised within contemporary Argentina’s collec-
tive public sphere.
4.2.1 Domestic Politics

At the beginning of El premio, as the viewer is introduced through a
wide establishing shot to the bleak landscape that provides the backdrop
for the majority of the film, Cecilia is seen in the distance struggling to
roller-skate across the wet sand (Fig. 4.6) The dull colours, prolonged
views of the harsh coastline, and the discordant background music all
reflect the child’s frustration at not being able to play in her new set-
ting. ‘Acá no se puede patinar, mamá’ (I can’t skate here, mummy), she
complains repeatedly, as her disinterested mother struggles to fix a bro-
ken window in their modest, wind-beaten beach dwelling. As the film
progresses, it swiftly becomes apparent that Cecilia is denied many of the
usual aspects of childhood not only as a result of her new surroundings
but also, more fundamentally, by the political actions of her parents—the
mother’s ominous references to those ‘que [los] quieren encontrar’ (who
want to find [them]) and the disturbingly unexplained absence of her
father evocatively insinuate the reasons behind the tense and nomadic
lifestyle the child is experiencing. Moreover, when the child asks her
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160 G. Maguire
mother ‘qué significa pesimista’ (what pessimistic means) shortly after

this introductory episode—a question whose true value is not revealed
until later in the film, when we see Cecilia read a letter from her dis-
appeared father—the child inadvertently sums up the desperation of her
new situation, forced into unfamiliar settings and burdened with the task
of maintaining an entirely new identity.
The despondency and desolation of the child’s new domestic situation
is evocatively reflected in the sophisticated visual aspects of El premio. As
Paul Julian Smith argues, the film’s ‘long takes, elliptical narrative and
rigorous rejection of visual pleasure’ (2014: 193) hauntingly reflect the
frustration and boredom felt by the protagonist herself, and the recur-
ring, drawn-out static shots of the vast open expanse of the beach par-
adoxically seem to accentuate the claustrophobia of the wind-beaten
dwelling. The film’s ‘unaesthetic aesthetic’ (2014: 193) is, perhaps, at
its most impactful during numerous lengthy scenes in which the wind
relentlessly lashes against the wooden hut or when broken windows
bang repeatedly—and irritatingly—against their frames. The mounting
sensations of malaise and persecution that these scenes foment echo the
immense danger posed by the infiltration of the public world of poli-
tics into the domestic sphere. ‘Partí de la sensación de que los exteriores
invaden el interior’, explained Markovitch in an interview, shortly after
the release of the film: ‘No hay resguardo posible, no hay hogar, […]
el viento y el mar llegan hasta los espacios más íntimos’ (I started with
the feeling that the outside was invading the inside. There is no possible
shelter, there’s no home, and the wind and the sea reach even the most
private spaces) (cit. Koza 2011). Indeed, when the film’s narrative cli-
max approaches and the child endangers the pair with the content of a
school essay, the subsequent flooding of the hut and the mother’s futile
attempts to combat the flow of water from the sea encapsulates the help-
lessness of the protagonists’ situation, emphasising the precarious ramifi-
cations of the girl’s actions outside the familial setting.
In a similar fashion to the young protagonist of Marcelo Piñeyro’s
Kamchatka (2002) or twelve-year-old Juan in Infancia clandestina, the
responsibility Cecilia experiences in preserving an alias outside the fam-
ily home, though first presented to the child as a game, very quickly
develops into a more serious matter. While references to playing appear
frequently in the film’s narrative, an episode immediately preceding the
girl’s first day at school anticipates the gravity and danger of the adult
‘game’ she is entering. As the mother combs Cecilia’s hair, the latter
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laughing and pulling comical facial expressions, both the ensuing dia-
logue and the severity of the mother’s tone underline the precarious
nature of venturing out of the domestic setting and into the school envi-
ronment:
Mother: Dale, no juego más, no juego más. ¿Estás segura de que
querés ir a la escuela?
Cecilia: Sí, pero tengo sueño.
M: ¿Y qué vas a decir si te preguntan?
C (in a deep comical voice): Que mi papá vende cortinas y mi mamá
es ama de casa.
[Mother: Come on, I’m not playing anymore, I’m not playing. Are
you sure you want to go to school?
Cecilia: Yes, but I’m sleepy.
M: And what are you going to say if they ask you anything?
C: That my dad sells curtains and my mum stays at home.]
When Cecilia returns from school and informs her mother, whilst
laughing almost uncontrollably, that ‘todos los chicos [le] creyeron’
(all the kids believed [her]’), and that she even managed to dupe her
teacher with her cover story, the mother’s stoic refusal to respond or
share in the child’s laughter again highlights the gravity of the situa-
tion; a situation that the contemporary viewer understands implicitly
even if the child, at this stage, does not. Initially, Cecilia is indeed
unable to grasp the full meaning of certain historical allusions in the
film, for example the military’s invocation to ‘la bandera de guerra’
(the flag of war) or the teacher’s insistence that the children include
‘el amarillo del sol’ (the yellow of the sun) in their pictures of the
national flag.10 However, the exponential incursion of public poli-
tics into the private setting of the beach house transforms Cecilia’s
world and forces her to negotiate the conventionally safe spaces
of the school environment and its playground in an increasingly
shrewd and adult manner.  While Henry Jenkins reminds us that the
‘dominant conception of childhood innocence presumes that chil-
dren exist in a space beyond, above, outside the political’ (1998:
2), El premio’s portrayal of Cecilia as an integral part in the sur-
vival of her family, and the profound politicisation of her childhood
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162 G. Maguire
experience, underline the necessity in reassessing the conventionally dis-

tinct borders between adulthood and childhood. A particularly striking
allusion to this dissolution of ‘safe’ spaces is to be found in an early epi-
sode in the school yard, when, after one student is caught cheating in a
test, the teacher forces the students to walk in circles until the accom-
plice is revealed (Fig. 4.7). The image of the children, clothed identically
in white school smocks, their heads facing the ground and visibly suffer-
ing from the cold and pouring rain, is bleakly reminiscent of both the
maltreatment of detainees in other cultural representations of the mili-
tary’s brutality and the discipline of a prison setting, a situation height-
ened all the while by the growing tension of forcing the children to
betray—or ‘soplar’—their compañeros.
As the conventional demarcations between childhood and adult-
hood are undermined, the former no longer ‘representative of a cat-
egory whose significance [lies], primarily, in what [it] reveals about
adult life’ (James 2009: 35), the ensuing politicisation of the domestic
spaces that Cecilia inhabits in El premio calls for a parallel reconsidera-
tion of the divisions between the film’s public and private spaces. As
Edward King argues, the early trajectory of post-dictatorship Argentine
cinema employed ‘the figure of the “hijo” as the voice of a national
conscience, an agent for the insistence on memory in the face of efforts
made during the Menem era to forgive and forget’ (2013: 160). More
recent dictatorship-related film has, however, looked to the child pro-
tagonist not as a vehicle for the insistence on historical memory but as
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a means of exposing the complex relationship between the political and

the domestic in the context of militancy, and of stressing the contin-
ued contemporary friction between collective memory and individual,
personal narrations of the past. As part of this trend, Markovitch does
not simply seek to nuance contemporary views on the domestic conse-
quences of left-wing militancy in the context of 1970s Argentina, but
she also attempts to endow the generational figure of the hijo with an
independent agency against the backdrop of contemporary Argentine
society: a society, as Gonzalo Aguilar writes in Other Worlds, that has
tended to ‘interpolate these victims exclusively as children, which does
not allow them any other identification’ (2011: 167). The focus on
domestic spaces in El premio does not, therefore, signify a reluctance to
engage in political debate, but represents a repoliticisation of historical
narratives of militancy through the gaze of the child. Thus, while critics
such as Cecilia Sosa read the works of this generation as ‘becom[ing]
public document[s] that transform the domestic space into the scenario
of national trauma’ (2012: 224), here the domestic space has distinct
function. The use of such spaces in El premio not only forces us to reas-
sess the contemporary consequences of such domestic incursions of
left-wing militancy but also, more provocatively, exposes the continued
incursion of the public gaze into the lives of these hijos and undermines
any collective appropriation of this experience as a ‘public document’ of
trauma.
An early scene of the film underlines the child’s initial incomprehen-
sion of the political gravity of her present situation. As her mother bur-
ies books in the sand, presumably literature that would have implicated
the pair if discovered, Cecilia uncovers a copy of Robin Hood and fol-
lows her mother’s example by concealing it in a hole in the ground. The
following exchange between mother and daughter highlights the child’s
naivety:
Cecilia: Mamá, ¿puedo enterrar mi libro?

Mother: ¿Por qué?
C: Para jugar.
M (angrily): Dejá de joder, nena.
[Cecilia: Can I bury my book, mummy?
Mother: Why?
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164 G. Maguire
C: Just to play.
M: Stop messing around.]
Though the child’s ignorance visibly irritates the mother during this
early scene, Cecilia does however progressively exert a growing sense of
shrewdness and a more astute understanding of the dangers of her sit-
uation. For example, after writing the essay that could potentially ruin
their cover in their new village, Cecilia then stops on her way home
from school to bury her notebook in the sand—an attempt, following
her mother’s example, to eliminate any trace of their ‘subversiveness’.
Though the child later feigns incomprehension of her mistake in writing
the essay, her attempt to conceal the evidence and her repeated efforts to
make her unresponsive mother read the essay do, nevertheless, exhibit a
growing awareness of her precarious circumstances. Furthermore, when
the error is eventually revealed, her insistence that she was only forbid-
den to say these things, and not to write them, already demonstrates a
capacity to negotiate the rules of the adult world in her own defence.
The recurring metaphor of concealing evidence takes on a more sinister
turn towards the end of the film as Cecilia attempts to bury her only
friend in the sand during a game, knowing the consequences that may
result from being associated with either her or her mother. ‘Va a venir
alguien y vos no vas a estar aquí’, Cecilia explains: ‘Dicen ¿dónde estás?
¿dónde estás? Y no vas a estar. Estarás enterradita’ (Someone’s going
to come but you won’t be here. They’ll say: ‘Where are you, where are
you?’ But you won’t be here; you’ll be all covered up). The discordancy
of the ensuing extra-diegetic music provides an unsettling backdrop for
the image of the two girls lying on the sand (Fig. 4.8), and the spectator
becomes aware—with similarities to the fate of the desaparecidos in mind
and, particularly, the dictatorship’s vuelos de muerte (death flights)11—
of the girl’s mounting grasp of the imminent and significant dangers
of her place in the adult world As Patricia Holland writes: ‘Ultimately
childhood cannot be contained, and the boundaries will not hold. The
relationship between childhood and adulthood is not a dichotomy but
a variety of fluctuating states, constantly under negotiation’ (2004: 16).
Indeed, as El premio effectively demonstrates, Cecilia’s experience and
responses to her politicised surroundings reveal a complication of these
traditional boundaries. It is through this increasing sense of agency
that the more conventional narratives of victimhood for the hijo are
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undermined and replaced with a rehistoricised and repoliticised represen-

tation of this past that avoids seeing either the domestic sphere or the
realm of childhood as discretely demarcated spaces, free from the politics
and scrutiny of the public sphere.
4.2.2 Intergenerational Tensions

In her article on the child in post-dictatorship Argentine cinema, Irene
Depetris Chauvin writes: ‘La figura de los hijos de los desaparecidos con-
stituye un centro a partir del cual pueden medirse, tanto las consecuen-
cias que la dictadura tuvo en la sociedad en general, como el impacto
que los sucesivos presentes operaron sobre los discursos que refieren a
ese período histórico’ (The figure of the child of the disappeared acts as
a prism through which we can measure both the general consequences
the dictatorship had on society and the impact that subsequent pre-
sents had on discourses that refer to this historical period) (2006: 100).
Ultimately, through a discussion which encompasses films ranging from
Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial (1985) to more recent productions such
as María Inés Roqué’s Papá Iván (2000) and Albertina Carri’s Los rubios
(2003), Depetris Chauvin concludes in her article that ‘[e]n oposición
a cines anteriores, el nuevo cine [desde 2000] no pretende—por lo
menos no abiertamente—“abrir los ojos” del espectador e iluminar su
entendimiento histórico, sino que más bien intenta exponer sus resulta-
dos en el ejercicio de una especie de “pesimismo crítico”’, in which ‘la
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166 G. Maguire
mirada de dos generaciones confrontan y debaten’ (as opposed to pre-

vious films, new cinema does not pretend—or at least not openly—to
“open your eyes” as a spectator or offer an enhanced historical under-
standing, but rather it seeks to present its findings with a type of “criti-
cal pessimism”, [in which] the viewpoints of two generations confront
and oppose one another) (2006: 109–110). Verónica Garibotto discusses
this ideological friction in a similar manner, drawing a parallel between
the evolution of post-dictatorship cinema in Argentina and the biological
development of the second generation itself, contending that the former
‘grew up as [the latter] were growing up, evolved as they were evolv-
ing, and reached adulthood—and maybe even saturation point—as they
became adults’ (2012: 175).12 Interestingly, while Garibotto therefore
sees the second generation in Argentina as post-dictatorship cinema’s
‘formal epitome’ (174), she does, however, suggest that the aforemen-
tioned recent focus on the child protagonist represents an anomaly
within this ‘diachronic tendency’ (177): a formal decision, she argues,
that symbolises a reluctance to engage with ‘larger political causes’ (186)
through a deliberate reversion to the innocence and ignorance of child-
hood. ‘Rather than a successful means of historical exploration’, writes
Garibotto, ‘the configuration of a teenage subjectivity can be the exact
opposite—the basis for converting the 1970s into a static mandate that
precludes further interpretation’ (186). Refuting this perspective and,
more broadly, challenging the dominant focus on restrictive notions of
dependency and trauma in debates surrounding the child’s experience,
this discussion of El premio instead posits the figure of the child as means
not only of challenging homogenised notions of the past, but also of
exposing the past’s present political potency. Far from a ‘static mandate’
that impedes a greater understanding of the past, the complexity of the
child’s gaze is precisely what allows for a generational recuperation of
narrative agency and, on a broader scale, for a sense of the personal that
remains unaffected by the public gaze.
While the previously mentioned Infancia clandestina portrays the era’s
violence more explicitly than comparable contemporaneous productions
by realistically depicting the immediate impact on the private life of active
Montonero militants, El premio poignantly illustrates the prolonged
domestic consequences of such militancy through its overwhelmingly
bleak portrayal of life as a dependent of those implicated in left-wing
militancy after a parent has been disappeared. As Janice Breckenridge
contends, while in films such as Kamchatka and Darío Stegmeyer’s
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El balancín de Iván (Ivan’s Seesaw 2002), ‘[t]he result is a sentimental

account that idealizes childhood and romanticizes long-lost parents who
are cast in the stereotyped roles of selfless protectors valiantly sacrific-
ing their lives for their ideals’ (2012: 104), El premio’s depiction of the
strained relationship between mother and child surfaces as a harsh cri-
tique of the harmful effects of militancy’s ideological demands and reveals
an intergenerational tension which transcends the film itself. The moth-
er’s almost complete lack of sentimental engagement with her daugh-
ter, regularly ignoring what she says and providing barely any emotional
support whatsoever, intensifies the child’s sense of loneliness and isola-
tion, reflected in formal techniques such as lengthy and frequent pano-
ramic shots of Cecilia alone amid the severe, grey backdrop of the rugged
coastline (Fig. 4.9) While Emma Wilson reminds us in Cinema’s Missing
Children that ‘the suffering of children appears a limit or absolute in
ethical thinking’ (2003: 157), here the mother’s cold revelation of the
death of Cecilia’s cousin and the almost spiteful disclosure of the possible
murder of the girl’s father after a particularly heated argument point to a
childhood that has been divested of the warmth and emotional protection
that are conventionally considered to be its constituent elements. Shortly
after this dispute between mother and daughter, Cecilia is seen waiting in
line to be awarded the film’s eponymous prize. During this heavily politi-
cised scene, in which soldiers surround the child and the school fills with
the sound of the Argentine national anthem, a short exchange with her
friend reveals the emotional register at play in the girl’s life:
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168 G. Maguire
Silvia: ¿Qué te pasa?

Cecilia: Me aprietan los zapatos.
[Pause]
C: Y mi mamá dijo que mi padre puede llegar a estar muerto.
[Silvia: What’s wrong with you?
Cecilia: My shoes are too tight.
[Pause]
C: And my mummy said that my dad might be dead.]
The almost stoic declaration from Cecilia of her father’s possible death
is sharply set into relief against the scene around her, as a military lieu-
tenant extols the virtues of ‘la educación y las armas, la escuela y el ejé-
rcito’ (education and weapons, school and the army), the latter of each
pair being the very reason for her father’s agonising absence. When the
camera focuses directly on the girl amidst ranks of soldiers (Fig. 4.10) at
the end of the scene, both the isolation of her situation and the increas-
ingly politicised nature of her childhood experience are heightened. In
this way, Markovitch both proposes a damning critique of this unre-
solved intergenerational tension and intensifies the very real private grief
of losing a parent.
‘If the image of the child victim places the artist, the scholar, or
the historian into the space of the child witness, then it would seem
to impede working through’, writes Marianne Hirsch in ‘Projected
Memories’: ‘Most important, the easy identification with children, their
virtually universal availability for projection, risks the blurring of impor-
tant areas of difference and alterity: context, specificity, responsibility,
history’ (1999: 16). As I have argued, however, Markovitch’s portrayal
of the seven-year-old Cecilia in El premio convincingly complicates such
conventional and reductive conceptions of the child protagonist, and
represents not a refusal to engage with history but an active re-examina-
tion of homogenised perspectives towards the past. In several episodes of
the film, for example, it becomes manifest that Cecilia is conscious of the
fact she thinks in a manner quite differently to adults. It is precisely this
distinct perspective and defiance of adult logic that, as Tzvi Tal contends,
‘posibilit[an] representar a veces en modo crítico y otras pedagógico,
aspectos de la vida social que la hegemonía ideológica ha “naturalizado”
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y transformado en la lógica cotidiana’ (enable[s] the representation—

at times critically, at other times pedagogically—of aspects of social life
that ideological hegemony has ‘naturalized’ and transformed into every-
day logic) (2005: 142). It is, however, when Cecilia is used to engen-
der an estranging effect towards the adult choice of militancy that the
child’s gaze is at its most critical. During a particularly distressing epi-
sode between mother and daughter towards the end of the film, the girl’s
relentless and unanswered questions surrounding the reasons for her
father’s disappearance expose and critique, through Cecilia’s childish—
yet astute—logic, the sheer incredulity of the adult characters’ continued
dedication to militancy despite the harmful and irreversible effects on the
family unit. In this sense, therefore, Cecilia undermines Hirsch’s claims
that an identification with the child protagonist impedes a sense of work-
ing through or represents a reluctance to engage with history; conversely,
it is precisely this more sensitive and complex treatment of the seven-
year-old’s experience which, at once, forces the viewer to reconsider the
effects of militancy on the domestic sphere, and, importantly, allows the
director to process this past and its consequences on the present.
4.2.3 The Ethics of Prosthetics

‘[R]ecent films have caught me unawares, reminding me at every turn
of the (suffering) child as visceral, sentient, moving, present’ (2005:
340), writes Emma Wilson in an article on recent European film:
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170 G. Maguire
‘Contemporary films seek to open up the representation of children,

strategically denying the distinct division between adults and children,
provoking a seizure of emotive response, where adults suddenly feel like
children. Regression is not the aim here; rather, politically, filmmakers
address and undermine the power relations which have existed between
adults and children’ (331). Indeed, as the intense domestic conflict
between Cecilia and her mother comes to problematise conventional
understandings of adult-child power relations, ascribing Cecilia a grow-
ing sense of agency in the film, Markovitch also frequently intensifies the
girl’s perspective through numerous lengthy close-ups of her observing
her surroundings or clearly failing to comprehend her mother’s actions
(Fig. 4.11). This heightened identification with the child figure is, how-
ever, as Wilson confirms, not deployed with the aim of spectatorial
‘regression’, or in order to assert an affiliative sense of victimhood for the
child figure; conversely such identification in El premio at once provides
a more nuanced generational and political critique of this past and, at the
same time, exposes the continued contemporary tensions between collec-
tive memory and discrete, individual narratives of experience in contem-
porary Argentina.
In an article discussing Hirsch’s previously mentioned work on pho-
tography and the child witness, Susannah Radstone argues against a
tendency in contemporary memory and trauma studies to ‘mobilize
a dialogics of witnessing to testimonies of trauma—to the overwhelm-
ing and well-nigh unrepresentable experiences of innocent victimhood’
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(2001: 61, emphasis in original). For Radstone, the ethical aesthetics of

Hirsch’s ‘over-identificatory impulses’ with the child witness negate an
important possibility ‘to explore further the complex and multiple iden-
tifications [such] images offer—identifications that are not excluded by
an interpretative framework of testimonial witnessing and that include,
but are certainly not limited to, an identification with the child’ (64,
emphasis in original). Thus, while Hirsch claims that ‘[t]he image of the
child victim, moreover, facilitates an identification in which the viewer
can too easily become a surrogate victim’ (1999: 16), the more com-
plex and politicised treatment of Cecilia’s experience, along with the
refusal to present her as merely a helpless spectator of her parents’ mili-
tancy, successfully denies a sense of surrogate victimhood for the viewer,
and, through certain formal techniques, ultimately inhibits any straight-
forward, sympathetic understanding of Cecilia’s domestic experience of
militancy.
In Technics and Time 3, Bernard Stiegler analyses cinema’s capacity
to construct an experience of time and focuses specifically on the ‘exte-
riorization of memory’ through temporal objects such as cinema. For
Stiegler, the temporal synchronisation of a viewer’s consciousness with
the on-screen actions of protagonists—whether real or fictive—leads,
on the part of the audience, to the ‘adopt[ion] of events as though
they were happening to us as they happened to them’ (2011: 10–11).
Similarly, in Prosthetic Memory, Alison Landsberg maintains that the
technologies of mass culture have led to the collectivisation of individ-
ual and private memories, and argues that ‘[t]he resulting “prosthetic”
memory has the ability to shape a person’s subjectivity and politics’
(2004: 2). While Stiegler offers a much broader analysis than Landsberg,
both critics stress the particularity of the cinematic medium in the crea-
tion of new forms of public memory.13 Interestingly, however, while
Stiegler focuses largely on the technical structures that enable the adop-
tion of individual experience by the collective, Landsberg goes much fur-
ther in her analysis of the ethical potential of the medium through the
affective adoption of such memories.14 She writes:
Part of the political potential of prosthetic memory is its ability to enable

ethical thinking. Thinking ethically means thinking beyond the immediacy
of one’s own wants and desires. Prosthetic memory teaches ethical thinking
by fostering empathy. As I described previously, the experience of empathy
has more potential and is more politically useful and progressive than its
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172 G. Maguire
cousin sympathy. Sympathy, a feeling that arises out of simple identifica-

tion, often takes the form of wallowing in someone else’s pain. […] This
act can be imperializing and colonizing, taking over, rather than mak-
ing space for, the other person’s feelings. In the act of sympathizing, one
not only reinforces the victimhood of the other but also establishes hierarchies.
(149, my emphasis)
Landsberg celebrates the ‘meaningful contact’ that this prosthetic iden-

tification enables with the past, ‘open[ing] the door for a new relation
to the past, a strategic form of remembering that has ramifications for
the politics of the present’ (152). As Rita de Grandis observes, previously
mentioned films such as Kamchatka and El balancín de Iván present
essentially passive child protagonists whose presence commands a sympa-
thetic response, a process that ‘renders that traumatic past simpler and
more palatable for transnational and national audiences’ (2011: 236). In
El premio, however, the increased sense of selfhood attributed to Cecilia
in the course of the film, and the considerable tension between mother
and child in the domestic sphere, instead demands an empathetic process
of spectatorial participation.
The position and status of both Cecilia and her mother within the
community of San Clemente del Tuyú further complicate any such spec-
tatorial participation. As outsiders to this community, coming from the
city of Buenos Aires, the pair stands out in specific ways among the peo-
ple of the village. Markovitch often chooses to highlight this visually, for
example when Cecilia finds herself among school friends, contrasting the
girl with her peers either by the position of the camera or by the colours
of her clothing (Fig. 4.12). Indeed, it is precisely this refusal to allow for
a simple identification with the figure of Cecilia that eschews any per-
spective which may reinforce a notion of victimhood or, indeed, estab-
lish a sense of spectatorial hierarchy. The viewer experiences a heightened
sensitivity for the child protagonist yet also, at the same time, under-
stands both the difficult position that the mother is in (something the
child does not) and the danger of their conspicuous presence in the vil-
lage community. There is, therefore, a move towards comprehending the
complexity and extent of this intergenerational tension, which precludes
any straightforwardly traumatic interpretation of Cecilia’s experience.
‘The experience of empathy [as opposed to sympathy], by contrast,
is not purely emotional but also contains a cognitive component’, con-
cludes Landsberg: ‘It is characterized by feeling for, while feeling
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
different from, the object’ (2004: 149). While, at times, the immense
fear and sheer incomprehension are quite clearly evident in Cecilia’s face,
particularly during the film’s aforementioned numerous and prolonged
close-ups (Fig. 4.11), Markovitch frequently underscores this affective
distance between the adult spectator and the child protagonist. Most
notably, this is achieved through the recurring extreme wide shots of the
child alone amidst the harsh background of the windswept coast; scenes
that, although punctuated with close-ups of the girl’s face, deny any last-
ing or substantial sense of identification (Fig. 4.9). In the final sequence
of the film, the only scene in which Cecilia authentically cries, not as a
result of a childish argument or because she wants to get her own way,
the chilling sound of her sobs is heightened by the static position of
the camera and the lack of movement in the frame. Even as the scene
cuts to black and the credits start to roll, the intense sobbing can still
be heard; subsequently, as the dedication to her parents is presented on
screen, the spectator is reminded of the intensely personal nature of the
child’s expression of pain. However, despite ostensibly tending towards
a sympathetic identification, Markovitch uses this final scene to assert a
conclusive sense of formal and aesthetic distance between spectator and
protagonist, focusing the camera on Cecilia, rendered almost invisible
by the blowing sand, and denying the spectator any direct view of the
girl’s face (Fig. 4.13). With her face still occluded from the viewer’s gaze
in the final shot of the film, the usual interpretive codes for the child
protagonist therefore remain out of reach for the spectator and any final
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174 G. Maguire
meaning or resolution of Cecilia’s fate is unattainable. While we may, to

an extent, identify ‘prosthetically’ with Cecilia’s history, the sudden end-
ing and the unsure nature of her future reveal a conclusive limit on the
spectator’s potential for affective identification.
‘Once childhood is superseded by adult stocks of knowledge, those
adult filters can never be removed to get back to earlier states’, writes
Owain Jones: ‘Adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to be
a child are inevitably processed through adultness’ (2001: 177). While
the frequent confrontations between Cecilia and her mother give a sense
of uncomfortable voyeurism, with the spectator functioning almost as
an intruder in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the beach dwelling and
in these very intimate domestic moments between mother and child,
it is when the camera focuses on the girl alone, playing a or reading a
book, where these distancing techniques between the adult spectator
and child protagonist employed by Markovitch are at their most effec-
tive. In these recurring scenes, any approximation to the girl’s thoughts
is not only rendered difficult by the film’s formal choices, but is actively
avoided. Indeed, by refusing to offer the spectator the opportunity
simply to adopt Cecilia’s perspective, and instead emphasising both an
affective and cognitive understanding of her situation, El premio at once
denies any spectatorial appropriation of victimhood and offers an effec-
tive and repoliticised engagement with historical memories of militancy.
The Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo has criticised the postmemorial gen-
eration for a reluctance to understand the political specificities of the
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parents’ generation and, in direct reference to Los rubios, for an impulse

to ‘postergar la dimensión más específicamente política de la historia,
para recuperar y privilegiar una dimensión más ligada con lo humano’
(withhold the specifically political dimension from the story, in order to
recover and privilege aspects related more to the human side of things)
(2005: 147). However, El premio’s presentation of the complete incur-
sion of public politics into the domestic sphere, and the refusal to pre-
sent Cecilia as the inert vehicle for a surrogate victimhood, thus places
the film not only simply in the realm of the director’s subjective memory
but also firmly in dialogue with the politics of historical representation.
4.2.4 Conclusion
In one of El premio’s recurring scenes, in which Cecilia plays alone with
a chessboard, the resonances with the director’s intentions are evident—
in the distinctly adult ‘game’ of Cecilia’s life, in which the next move is
a closely guarded secret, any straightforward, sympathetic identification
with the girl’s position is formally and aesthetically evaded. Indeed, while
Cecilia negotiates the public spaces of the school, its playground and the
vast expanses of the beach, her preliminary ignorance of the gravity of
her situation is swiftly replaced by a growing shrewdness towards the
implications of her parents’ political actions. In doing so, El premio thus
presents a child protagonist who problematises the broader conventional
proscription of agency within the realm of childhood. As Cecilia offers
an effective generational critique of the politicisation of her experiences
through her parents’ dedication to militancy, her increasing capacity to
negotiate such incursions of the public sphere effectively underscores
that ‘children should no longer be seen waiting, unproblematically, in
the wings of adulthood’ (James 2009: 37). By refusing to revert to the
figure of the child as a vehicle for instigating a sympathetic identification
on the part of the spectator, El premio thus complicates any consequen-
tial affiliative or collective position, and exposes, through its uncomfort-
able voyeurism, a sense of the continued societal gaze into the lives of
these children of the disappeared.
Indeed, while Hirsch contends that ‘[t]he adult viewer sees the child
victim through the eyes of his of her own child self’ (1999: 15), the issue
of spectatorial regression in El premio is more complex and problem-
atic. Though the intimate portrayal of Cecilia’s suffering may fuel any
affective attachment the adult witness holds for the child’s on-screen
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176 G. Maguire
situation, the delicate balance between the director’s desires to promote,

on the one hand, an affiliative understanding of the child’s situation and
yet, on the other, to avoid an assertion of victimhood or sympathy for
the child’s distress, reveals a conclusive limit to the identificatory pro-
cesses at play in the film. By avoiding what Susan Honeyman labels in
Elusive Childhood ‘the perceptual blind spot’ in understanding child-
hood, that is, the romanticised attitude which sees children ‘as not hav-
ing agency or consequence, […] as helpless, […] innocent, […] too
ignorant to represent themselves’ (2005: 2), El premio thus becomes
an important example of the recent trend in contemporary Argentine
cinema. The film re-presents the protagonist’s childhood as ‘a site of
political confrontation’ (Garibotto 2012: 175), both repoliticising con-
temporary attitudes towards the era in question and problematising the
position of the hijo in contemporary Argentine society.
4.3 Conclusion: Spectacular Childhoods

In Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds, Claudia Castañeda argues against
conceptualisations of the child simply as ‘an adult in the making, […] as
a potentiality rather than an actuality, a becoming rather than a being: an
entity in the making’ (2002: 1). By approaching the child from a distinct
perspective that refutes the adult-child dichotomy and sees such poten-
tiality not as a limiting factor but as the productive basis for a critical
subjectivity, Castañeda thus re-theorises the child as an agent, with an
increased propensity to disrupt dominant cultural and political assump-
tions. She writes:
My aim, then, is to think the subject in terms that can account for the
particularity of children’s existence, as well as adults’. This also means
accounting for the singularity of histories and changes in the life of any
singular subject, which may also include an account of that subject’s child-
hood. From this point of view, even an infant is not simply the raw natu-
ral material of the future adult subject it will become but rather an entity
that is the effect of the agency of nature and the discursive matrix through
which it is formed and reformed. The infant ‘is’ a subject and has a subjec-
tivity that is particular to this interaction. […] What might be called the
absence of language here, or rather the presence of particular modes of
embodied communication that do not include language per se, does not
constitute this entity as pre-subjective in this formulation, and as such
it cannot be occupied by adult fantasies or desires. Instead, this entity’s
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existence, and its embodiment are the grounds of its subjectivity, where
‘subjectivity’ signifies embodied experience. (170–171)
While the subjectivity of the seven-year-old narrator of La casa de los

conejos, for example, is conceptualised according to her ability to com-
mand the language of the adult world, both Infancia clandestina and El
premio present child protagonists that problematise conventional delimi-
tations of the realm of childhood. Indeed, just as Castañeda argues in
favour of children’s ‘imaginative potency’ (9) in the usurpation of pre-
vailing cultural and political assumptions, both films accentuate the
child’s capacity for original historical insight.
Thus, while recent Argentine documentaries such as María Inés
Roqué’s Papá Iván (2000), Natalia Bruschtein’s Encontrando a Víctor
(2005) and Nicolás Prividera’s M (2008) focus almost exclusively on the
facts and dates surrounding their parents’ disappearance, here the over-
whelming emphasis on Juan and Cecilia points to a generational appro-
priation of subjectivity; an attempt, on the directors’ part, to escape
passivity or insignificance in relation to these pasts, and exert their pre-
rogative to negotiate memories of a history which are both fragmentary
and violent, yet remain deeply influential in relation to the contemporary
political and cultural concerns of an implicated generation. In rethink-
ing childhood in this way, against the dominant understanding of child-
hood as the traumatic site for later adult anxieties over identity and
memory, and by acknowledging the irreversible incursion of public poli-
tics into the domestic space of the home, this accent on the agency of
the childhood experience thus also allows these directors to undermine
the contemporary societal emphasis on a hereditary sense of victimhood.
Although both films often technically foreground Juan and Cecilia’s per-
spectives, emphasizing them as the protagonists of the story and fuelling
any affective attachment the viewer may generate with their heightened
sensorial and ‘embodied experience’ (Castañeda 2002: 171) of the vio-
lence and repression of the era, there does, however, remain a conclusive
limit to our understanding of the very personal and private experi-
ences presented on screen. Through these child protagonists, Ávila and
Markovitch stake out an independent position in the present, acknowl-
edging the true political and affective weight of this past yet refusing
to be confined by it; as members, that is, of a distinct and independent
generation, and, ultimately, as individual and discrete parts of any such
attempts at collectivity.
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178 G. Maguire
Notes
1. The term ‘embute’ was popular in 1970s left-wing militancy and referred
to a hiding place within a casa operativa (an underground operational
house). In Alcoba’s novel, the embute was hidden behind a fake wall and
used to hide a printing press that produced Montonero propaganda, such
as copies of Evita Montonera.
2. For the majority of the film, and certainly in all scenes that take place out-
side the familial home, Juan is referred to as Ernesto, his clandestine name.
It is revealed in the course of the film that his real name, Juan, comes from
Juan Domingo Perón, and Ernesto, from Ernesto Che Guevara.
3. In this article, Tuñón and Tal discuss Kamchatka, Machuca and O ano em
que meus pais saíram de férias.
4. The sun, officially known as the Sol de Mayo, distinguishes the dictator-
ship’s ‘bandera de guerra’ from the Montoneros’ flag, ‘El Belgrano’,
named after Manuel Belgrano, the designer of the flag in 1812. Since
1985, the former has been the official flag of Argentina.
5. The blindfolding process here is part of Montonero protocol, employed in
order to keep the whereabouts of the casas operativas hidden, even from
the militants who resided there.
6. Juan and his baby sister, Vicky, enter the country under fake identities
and with two of their parents’ Brazilian compañeros, who act as his par-
ents and instruct the boy: ‘Si alguien te pregunta algo, decí “Eu não falo
espanhol”’ (If anyone asks you anything, say: I don’t speak Spanish).
7. Again, this echoes an earlier episode that Juan witnesses when his parents
and their compañeros toast the boy’s uncle, who chose to take his own life
during a failed counter-offensive rather than be arrested, interrogated and
tortured by the military.
8. All three sequences are triggered either by a gunshot or an explosion.
9. Also, these are the glasses that Juan uses as a comical disguise at the begin-
ning of the film, when practising his cover story in front of his family.
10. The sun, officially known as the Sol de Mayo, distinguishes the dictator-
ship’s ‘bandera de guerra’ from the Montoneros’ flag, ‘El Belgrano’,
named after Manuel Belgrano, the designer of the flag in 1812. Since
1985, the former has been the official flag of Argentina.
11. Routinely practised during the Dirty War in Argentina, the vuelos de
muerte were a strategic form of disappearing the bodies of militants.
Detainees were drugged, stripped, placed into airplanes, then dropped,
mid-flight and in darkness, into the Río de la Plata. Bodies were often
found washed up on the banks of the Río, as in the infamous case of the
two French nuns, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet. See Feld (2012) for
a detailed study.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
12. Garibotto also draws a parallel on the level of content: from the children
and teenagers appearing in La historia oficial and Héctor Olivera’s La
noche de los lápices (Night of the Pencils 1986) during the immediate after-
math of the democratic transition; through the young adult documentary
makers in the 1990s; then culminating in recent explorations of this past
from an adult perspective through films such as Los rubios and Nicolás
Prividera’s M (2007).
13. In particular, Stiegler goes beyond the experience of mass-media and
distinguishes cinema as merely a ‘distinctive shift in the history [that]
partakes in the […] “exteriorization of memory” from primitive tools
through writing to analogue and digital recording’ (Roberts 2006: 60).
14. Both Landsberg and Hirsch draw on Kaja Silverman’s discussion of ‘het-
eropathic’ identification and ‘idiopathic’ identification (1996): the former
as an understanding of the other’s position as other, in which the ‘sub-
ject identifies at a distance from his or her proprioceptive self’; the lat-
ter as a complete, unmediated identification with the other, instigating an
‘absorption of another self by one’s own’ (1996: 23).
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Baeuchesne and Alessandra Santos, 235–258. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Depetris Chauvin, Irene. 2006. ‘Los chicos crecen: la generación de los hijos y el
cine de la postdictadura’. In Trabajos de la memoria: arte y cuidad en la post-
dictadura argentina, ed. Cecilia Macón, 99–118. Buenos Aires: Ladosur.
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El balancín de Iván. 2002. Directed by Darío Stegmayer. Argentina/Spain:

Éxodo Produciones/Cine Gestión SL.
El premio. 2011. Directed by Paula Markovitch. Argentina/Mexico/France/
Poland/Germany: Elite Studios.
Feld, Claudia. 2012. ‘Image and Disappearance in Argentina: Reflections on a
Photo Taken in the Basement of ESMA’. Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies 21 (2): 313–341.
Garibotto, Verónica. 2012. ‘Iconic Fictions: Narrating Recent Argentine History
in Post-2000 Second-Generation Films’. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8 (2):
175–188.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1999. ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in
Personal and Public Fantasy’. In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the
Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, 3–23. Hanover,
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Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual
Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Holland, Patricia. 2004. Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular
Imagery. London: I.B.Tauris.
Honeyman, Susan. 2005. Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern
Fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Infancia clandestina. 2011. Directed by Benjamín Ávila. Historias Habitación
1520 Argentina/Brazil/Spain: Producciones.
James, Allison. 2009. ‘Agency’. In The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies,
ed. J. Qvortrup, W. Corsaro, and M.S. Honig, 34–45. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Jenkins, Henry. 1998. The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: New York
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Jones, Owain. 2001. ‘“Before the Dark of Reason”: Some Ethical and
Epistemological Considerations on the Otherness of Children’. Ethics, Place
and Environment 4: 173–178.
Kamchatka. 2002. Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro. Argentina: Patagonik Film
Group.
Kilbourn, Russell. 2010. Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of
Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema. London: Routledge.
King, Edward. 2013. Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and
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Kuhn, Annette. 2010a. ‘Cinematic Experience, Film Space and the Child’s
World’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19 (2): 82–98.
———. 2010b. ‘Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in
and with Visual Media’. Memory Studies 3 (4): 298–313.
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Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American

Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University
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La noche de los lápices. 1986. Directed by Héctor Olivera. Argentina: Aries
Cinematográfica Argentina.
Lebeau, Vicky. 2008. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books.
Lee, Nick. 2001. Childhood and Society: Growing up in an Age of Uncertainty.
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perfil.com/ediciones/columnistas/-20129-715-0064.html. Accessed on 24
Nov 2014.
Lewis, Paul H. 2002. Guerrillas and Generals: The ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina.
London: Praeger.
Lury, Karen. 2005. ‘The Child in Film and Television: Introduction’. Screen 46
(3): 307–314.
———. 2010. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales. London:
I.B.Tauris.
Machuca. 2004. Directed by Andrés Wood. Chile: Menemsha Entertainment.
Martin-Jones, David. 2011. ‘The Child-seer in and as History: Argentine
Melodrama’. In Deleuze and World Cinemas, ed. David Martin-Jones, 69–99.
London, New York: Continuum.
Monteagudo, Luciano. 2002. ‘El amor, en medio del horror del ‘76’.
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los/6-11594-2002-10-17.html. Accessed on 24 Nov 2014.
O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias. 2006. Directed by Cao Hamburger.
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“Industrialisation of Memory”’. Angelaki 11 (1): 55-63.
Ros, Ana. 2012. The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and
Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production. Basingstoke: Palgrave
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Sosa, Cecilia. 2012. ‘Queering Kinship. The Performance of Blood and the Attires
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———. 2014. Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s
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Stargardt, Nicolas. 2005. Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis.
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Tal, Tzvi. 2005. ‘Alegorías de memoria y olvido en películas de iniciación:
Machuca y Kamchatka’. Aisthesis 38: 136–151.
Thomas, Sarah. 2015. ‘Rupture and Reparation: Postmemory, the Child Seer
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gwm23@cam.ac.uk
CHAPTER 5
Performing Loss: Materiality and the

Repertoire of Absence
In New Argentine Cinema, Jens Andermann discusses Albertina Carri’s

polemical use of Playmobil figures in the reconstruction of her par-
ents’ disappearance in Los rubios. ‘Instead of the reassuring certainties
of the archival image, Los rubios opts for the discomfiting restaging of
Albertina’s own childhood imagination’, writes Andermann: ‘Far from
suppressing history and politics, Carri’s film reinscribes them but in a
way that strips them of the certainties of discursive convention’ (2012:
116, 118). In a move that reflects the wider conceptual scope of the
film, this imaginative performance of childhood loss through stop-
motion animation irreverently disregards any historical documentation
surrounding the Carris’ disappearance, opting instead to take a ‘play-
ful, desacralized, non-solemn and de-monumental approach to the
traumatic past’ (Blejmar 2013: 45). Indeed, as a ‘performative docu-
mentary’ (Nouzeilles 2005; Page 2009), the film’s sustained engage-
ment with archival documents not only exposes their inability to provide
a full account of the Carris’ lives but also points to a more foundational
criticism of the archive—a critique ‘based on the idea of disavowal’, as
Gabriela Nouzeilles remarks, ‘that simultaneously signals a desire to
make a conventional documentary […] while also indicting the unfeasi-
bility of the documentary’s cognitive ambitions’ (2005: 269). However,
while the film’s ‘performance of failure, its de-authorisation of dis-
course and its manipulation of images, permits no semantic closure’

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184 G. Maguire
(Lazzara 2009: 156), this inadequacy is, nevertheless, not characterised

by mourning but by potential. As the film draws to a close and the cam-
era crew appear onscreen wearing blonde wigs, ‘their identities fused into
a pantomimic performance of displaced identities’ (Nouzeilles 2005:
275), it is the capacity for a dynamic, performative approach to the past
which Los rubios celebrates, a creative process endowed with the potential
to transcend the indexical restrictions of the archive and reposition the
camera lens firmly on the present lives of those concerned.
Following Marianne Hirsch’s assertion in The Generation of
Postmemory that ‘[t]he index of postmemory (as opposed to memory) is
the performative index, shaped more by affect, need, and desire as time
and distance attenuate the links to authenticity and the truth’ (2012:
48), this chapter will consider the similarly performative elements of
certain works of photography and theatre from the post-dictatorship
generation, examining how an emphasis on the materiality of the docu-
ment allows these artists to move beyond notions of historical authentic-
ity and the restrictively semiotic nature of conventional conceptions of
the archive. Such a focus on the interaction between the artist and the
archive enables a critical perspective that is able to counteract, in Diana
Taylor’s terms, ‘the myths attending the archive’ which see it as ‘unmedi-
ated, […] that it resists change, corruptibility, and political manipulation’
(2003: 19). Indeed, as the documents of the archive are interrogated,
manipulated and, ultimately, often subverted, these works become, as
Simone Osthoff remarks in Performing the Archive, ‘performances in,
with, and of the archive [which] are producing an ontological change
from the archive as repository of documents to the archive as a dynamic
and generative tool’ (2009: 11). Similarly, Liedeke Plate and Anneke
Smelik contend in Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture that
such dynamic processes of performative memory have recalibrated the
relationship in contemporary artistic practice between the archive and
cultural memory. They write:
[Understanding memory as an embodied and localized practice] is part

and parcel of a broader paradigm shift within cultural memory studies,
from a linguistic to a performative turn. The difference is not only one of
focus, shifting attention from the memory trace to its act – the event of
memory, its happening. It also implies an epistemological, even ontological
shift, from memory as the trace of what once was to memory as the past’s
present moment. (2013: 5–6)
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5 PERFORMING LOSS: MATERIALITY AND THE REPERTOIRE OF ABSENCE 185
By foregrounding this presentness of memory, or rather on ‘the event of

memory, its happening’ (6), the photographers and playwrights contained
within this chapter employ innovative aesthetic and self-reflexive narrative
methods to draw attention to the present as the locus of recollection and
thus, in Nelly Richard’s terms, overcome the ‘repetición maníaco-obsesiva
del recuerdo’ (manic-obsessive repetition of memory) (1998: 46). This
discussion draws on Taylor’s considerations of post-dictatorship Southern
Cone culture in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas, considering how her interpretation of the rep-
ertoire relates to the photographic interventions of artists such as Lucila
Quieto, Gabriela Bettini and Inés Ulanovsky, and the multi-generic play
by Lola Arias, entitled Mi vida después (2009a). For Taylor, while ‘the
archive of supposedly enduring materials’ is distinguished by its ability to
‘succeed in separating the source of “knowledge” from the knower’, both
performance and ‘the repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge’, on the
other hand, require the presence of the subject concerned for the repro-
duction of any such knowledge (2003: 19–20, emphasis in original).
In opposition, therefore, to the conventional critical focus on notions
of historical authenticity and the subjective nature of the second gen-
eration’s performative engagements with memory, this chapter instead
underlines the significance of the present, material interactions between
the implicated subjects and objects of the archive. As Elizabeth Edwards
and Janice Hart contend, ‘The prevailing tendency is that photographs
are apprehended in one visual act, absorbing image and object together,
yet privileging the former, […] detached from their physical proper-
ties and consequently from the functional context of a materiality that
is glossed merely as a neutral support for its images’ (2004: 2). Indeed,
by thinking beyond the semiotic boundaries of traditional understand-
ings of archival material and by celebrating the physical presence and
performative incorporation of old images and objects into new contexts,
this post-dictatorship generation subsumes restrictive fixations on loss
and mourning within a broader, positive process of creative potential. As
the ‘stable fixity of the archive, with everything in its place for perpetuity,
is called into question when we start to consider an archive’s eventhood’
(Borggreen and Gade 2013: 379), such a postmemorial recourse to the
realm of performance, with its emphasis on the material object, is able to
endow these works with a strong sense of the present ‘eventhood’ of the
archive; a gesture from the repertoire, in Taylor’s terms, that ‘allows for
immediate response to current political problems’ (208).
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186 G. Maguire
5.1 Part One: Materiality and the Archive

in Contemporary Argentine Photography
In Fotos tuyas (2006), the Argentine photographer Inés Ulanovsky

opens her collection with an image of a cardboard box filled with fam-
ily photographs, with the most prominent space in the frame reserved
for a black-and-white image of Mario Alberto Gershanik, assassinated
by a paramilitary death squad in 1975 (Fig. 5.1).1 The headshot, strik-
ing obvious resonances with the ID photos of desaparecidos used by
the Madres and Abuelas on posters and placards during their regular
weekly marches, functions as the symbolic departure for a photo-essay
that focalises attention on the material presence of these images in the
lives of the second generation, questioning both the ostensibly unal-
terable indexicality of the family photo and the prevailing use of these
images by human rights organisations in Argentina’s post-dictatorship
period. Indeed, as these old and faded images are inserted into new con-
texts over the course of Ulanovsky’s collection, imbued with a renewed
significance from the present, the photo-essay thus gestures towards a
prominent rupture in contemporary Argentine photography, suturing
itself within a wider tendency on the part of contemporary photogra-
phers to approach such images, as Luis Ignacio García remarks, with ‘[u]
na voz generacional renovadora y una tematización metarreflexiva sobre
la propia memoria’ (a restorative generational voice and a meta-reflexive
focus on memory itself) (2011: 83). In the tension between the accented
archival materiality of this preliminary photo and the creativity of the
photographic interventions that come after, the lingering singular image
of the container, as David Rojinsky notes in the same context, ‘cannot
but suggest an imaginary cardboard grave’ (2010: 8); a sombre reposi-
tory which at once locks the pictures firmly within the two-dimensional
fixedness of the private family album and, at the same time, implicitly
hints towards their public co-optation as stagnant indexes of the lives
that have been disappeared.
Countering the spectral silence and the emphasis on loss in such
images of the disappeared, here their material presence and performative
inclusion in these collections—recast, recontextualised and often made
to share the photographic frame with the now-adult sons and daugh-
ters—at once expose the objective impossibility of constructing a dia-
logue between generations and, yet, simultaneously assume this dialogic
impasse as the creative impetus for their imaginative and inventive artistic
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Fig. 5.1 Photograph from Fotos tuyas, Inés Ulanovsky
interventions. While the emphasis in this discussion will be placed on

Lucila Quieto’s exhibition Filiación (2013), a collection that combines
photos from her previous work Arqueología de la ausencia (1999–2001)
with more recent collage work (2012–2013), attention will also be given
to the photographic oeuvres of other contemporary photographers,
namely Gustavo Germano, Gabriela Bettini and, as previously men-
tioned, Inés Ulanovsky. By situating Quieto’s works within this broader,
significant shift in the visual art of the post-dictatorship generation, this
chapter discusses how these aesthetic interventions into the photographic
archive denaturalise the idea of photography as an objective documen-
tary link to the past. By emphasising the materiality of these images,
the altered, worn and recontextualised photographs direct the viewer’s
gaze to the potential of the present rather than the disappeared past,
moving beyond their static indexicality as discrete markers of victim-
hood and thus throwing into relief the dynamic contemporary position
that the children of the disappeared occupy in relation to such loss. In
Photographs Objects Histories, Edwards and Hart write:
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188 G. Maguire
[A] photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimen-

sional image. As such, photographs exist materially in the world. […]
Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and
space and thus in social and cultural experience. They have ‘volume, opac-
ity, tactility and a physical presence in the world’ (Batchen 1997: 2) and
are thus enmeshed with subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions.
These characteristics cannot be reduced to an abstract status as a commod-
ity, nor to a set of meanings or ideologies that take the image as their pre-
text. (2004: 1)
Indeed, as Kerry Bystrom affirms in her article on Marcelo Brodsky and

León Ferrari, while the distinctive black-and-white images of the disap-
peared had been ‘convertidas en representación hegemónica de la desa-
parición, […] limitando su capacidad para funcionar como espacio para la
construcción de una memoria colectiva dinámica y crítica’ (transformed
into hegemonic representations of disappearance, […] limiting their
capacity to function as a space for the construction of a dynamic and crit-
ical collective memory) (2009: 318), this analysis offers a more produc-
tive reading of these photos’ potential in the present, discussing how the
sons and daughters appropriate such images and revitalise them with a
political significance that works against the grain of contemporary mem-
ory politics. As Jordana Blejmar contends in her work on this genera-
tion’s re-framing of old family photographs: ‘Son memorias compartidas,
publicitadas, no secretas e infortunadamente enlazadas al Estado desa-
parecedor. Así, lejos de ser el resultado de una defección de la política,
el pasaje que va de lo público a lo privado y viceversa, en estas miradas,
da cuenta de un desplazamiento mayor, de época, que ha empezado a
leer la dicotomía entre público y privado precisamente como una tensión
política’ (They are publicised, shared memories, which are not secret and
are unfortunately intertwined with a State that disappears its own citi-
zens. In this way, far from being the result of a defection from politics,
the movement in these images from the public to the private, and vice
versa, attests to a greater movement, an epochal movement, which has
started to read the dichotomy between public and private precisely as a
political tension) (2008: 205). Therefore, where the photographic docu-
ments of the archive fail to allow for a critical and interrogative reflec-
tion due to their ‘significado político “pre-envasado”’ (‘pre-packaged’
political significance) (Bystrom 2009: 318), this analysis argues, follow-
ing Blejmar, that the postmemorial repertoire steps into undermine this
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presumed political import and, instead, creatively exposes the continued

tensions between collective memory and individual, private narrations of
the past. By performatively reframing these photographs’ place in con-
temporary society and by moving beyond the exclusionary emphasis on
the visuality of the medium, the accentuated material presence of these
past images allows for a new understanding of both the public/private
divide in post-dictatorship Argentina and the position that the children
of the disappeared occupy in relation to such contested boundaries.
5.1.1 From Archive to Repertoire: Tactility and Presence

In an article entitled ‘Álbum de familia’, published in Punto de vista on
the 20th anniversary of the military coup, Leonor Arfuch examines the
persistence of private family photographs of the disappeared within the
Argentine cultural sphere, questioning these images’ relevance for con-
temporary generations. ‘¿[Q]ué desean esas imágenes, dispersas y recur-
rentes de nuestro álbum de familia colectivo?’, she enquires: ‘¿qué nos
piden?’ (What do these dispersed, recurring images from our collective
family album want? What are they asking of us?’) (1996: 11, emphasis
in original). While Arfuch stresses the significance of these photos dur-
ing the dictatorship period and in the years immediately afterwards, when
they functioned as highly effective counters to the brutality of the mil-
itary administration and its insidious denial of the existence of the dis-
appeared, she does however also gesture towards the importance of a
dynamic and renewed understanding of their significance, in keeping with
the political and cultural changes of post-transition society. She writes:
Ellas no están allí simplemente como un obituario o un recordatorio, no

simplemente irradian a la manera de iluminaciones momentáneas y doloro-
sas de un tiempo que fue, no solamente obedecen con docilidad a quienes
batallan sin descanso por su aparición, o se prestan resignadamente al
homenaje, sino que nos interrogan con fuerza pragmática desde una abso-
luta actualidad. (1996: 11, my emphasis)
[They do not exist solely as an obituary or memoir, nor do they simply

radiate painful, momentary glimpses of a time that has been lost; they do
not merely meekly obey those who fight tirelessly for their appearance, nor
lend themselves deferentially to acts of homage; instead, they forcefully and
pragmatically interrogate us from the absolute present.]
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190 G. Maguire
If, as Rojinsky likewise notes, ‘[O]ne would suspect that, outside of the
human rights movement, the black-and-white photographs of the deteni-
dos-desaparecidos are now more likely to be received by the wider public
as the visual embodiment of a mythologised history, rather than as pro-
vocative symbols in the present and future’ (2014: 3), then this genera-
tion of photographers seeks to revitalise the importance of these pivotal,
‘mythologized’ cultural symbols, reconfiguring their anachronistic politi-
cal significance for contemporary Argentina through a creative engage-
ment anchored firmly in ‘una absoluta actualidad’.
In Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin draws attention to the ‘event’
of the photograph, moving beyond conventional understandings of the
medium’s capacity as merely an index of past presence, a Barthesian
‘ça-a-été’, and instead calling for an acknowledgement of photography’s
materiality and present potential for creating new political meanings and
social interactions. She writes:
The fact that a photograph, once taken, can become a visual presence in
our world does not only mean that we look at photographs. We are also
with photographs; and we spend time in their presence. They are not only
visual presences, hallucinations, but also physical objects with a physical
visuality that we can touch. […] Made possible by context, photographs
are more than context: they touch one another and the viewer. They sub-
stitute for people. They can be, and even demand to be, handled. (2012:
16–17)
Similarly, in Photography’s Other Histories, Christopher Pinney argues that

the ‘concern for the political consequences of photographs has effec-
tively eroded any engagement with its actual practice’ (2003: 14), con-
cluding that the ‘stress on the cultural inscription of objects and images
has erased any engagement with materiality except in linguistic terms’
(2003: 182). The tactile interactions and emphasis on the physical-
ity of the image in the photo-essays contained within this study, how-
ever, point towards a renewed generational approach in contemporary
Argentina to the photograph as a material object. In Ulanovsky’s pre-
viously mentioned collection Fotos tuyas, this renewed understanding of
the physicality of the photo-object is evident in the move away from the
conventional conception of photography as archive, as images locked
within albums, frames and, most significantly, the past. Instead, Fotos
tuyas underscores and celebrates the new situations and emotions that
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
are facilitated by the contemporary performative interactions with such

images (Fig. 5.2). In these reframed encounters, which bring children,
parents and siblings together in one image, new emotions and affec-
tive exchanges are evoked by tactile interaction, with the surviving rela-
tive very often becoming the focus of the recast photograph while the
older image is obscured, translucent or even hidden from the viewer’s
sight (Fig. 5.3).2 For Ulanovsky, whose parents were not disappeared but
forced into exile, these generational encounters point not to the mourn-
ing of a disappeared past but to the potential, through the embodied
memory of the photograph, of a dynamic present understanding of loss
that may transcend the melancholic stagnancy of inherited victimhood.
In ‘Thinking Photography Beyond the Visual’, Edwards writes that
recent critical work on the photographic image as an object of material
culture has indeed begun to ‘[stress] the social dynamics of photographs
in specific cultural environments, as photographs are handled, caressed,
stroked, kissed, torn, wept over, lamented over, talked to and sung to in
ways that blur the distinction between person, index and thing’ (2009:
32). In the black-and-white generational encounters of Quieto’s Filiación,
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192 G. Maguire
for instance, taken from her earlier work Arqueología de la ausencia, the
intimacy and sensorial experience of touching a photograph and becom-
ing part of its image does indeed seem to fracture its indexical boundaries,
as the materiality of the image is brought to the fore and the distinc-
tions between ‘person, index and thing’ become, quite literally, blurred
(Fig. 5.4). In the prologue to Arqueología, Quieto reveals that the genesis
of her photo-essay lay in the unrealisable desire to have a photo with her
father, disappeared before her birth, and to intervene in the archive of her
family’s past in order to invent this memory between father and daughter.
‘No tengo foto con mi papá’, she explains: ‘Lo que tengo que hacer, me
dije, es meterme en la imagen, construir yo esa imagen que siempre había
buscado, hacerme parte de ella’ (I don’t have a photo with my dad. What
I have to do, I told myself, is put myself in the image, to construct the
image I always wanted, make myself part of it) (cit. Longoni 2011, my
emphasis). By projecting images of disappeared members of the previous
generation onto walls and screens while their sons and daughters appear
in the foreground, Quieto is thus able over the course of her photo-essay,
as fellow Argentine photographer Julieta Escardó observes, to use ‘fotos
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Fig. 5.4 Photograph from Filiación, Lucila Quieto
heredadas para crear [esas] fotos imposibles’ (inherited photos to create

[these] impossible photos) (2006). In the resultant photos, the black-and-
white nature of the images not only draws attention to the ghostly nature
of the sensorial encounters between disappeared parents and children,
some now visibly older than the faces of the desaparecidos in the projected
images behind them, but it often also obscures the image itself, adding an
extra layer of difficulty in discerning where one past image ends and a pre-
sent body starts. It is through this temporal confusion and the accented,
embodied materiality of the photographic encounter, as Ana Longoni
attests, that ‘[h]asta es posible dudar acerca de quienes son los padres y
quienes, los hijos’ (it even becomes possible to doubt who are the parents
and who are the children) (2011: 6).
For Edwards, such tactile interactions with family images, made pos-
sible by the very medium of the photograph itself, are able to succeed in
offering highly personal engagements with the past. She writes:
Touch is in many ways the most intimate of senses […] for it registers the
body to the outside world. Touch draws attention to the perception of
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194 G. Maguire
one’s own bodily state, as the outside is absorbed and registered through
sensitive parts of the body, especially hands. […] It is the act of touch-
ing the photograph that accentuates a sense of the presence of the ances-
tor, confirming vision, as touch and sight come together to define the real.
Photographs are held, caressed, stroked and kissed. In family photographs,
for instance, perhaps touch transfigures the indexical into the real for a
moment, as fingers trace the image of the referent, a sensory accumulation
which materializes historical consciousness. (2009: 43)
There is, nevertheless, a latent visual sense in Arqueología of the con-

structedness and incongruity of these scenes of generational reunion,
despite the momentary transfiguration of ‘the indexical to the real’.
If Ernesto Semán’s experience with his father on the imaginary Island
of Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China is an event narrated with no
attempt to hide its fantastical, fictive nature, in the same way there is no
attempt on Quieto’s part to present these deferred familial encounters
as wholly realistic generational experiences—creases and scratches in
the original images are left visibly exposed, and taped-up tears draw the
viewer’s attention both to the unmediated rawness of the photographic
image and to the passage of time.
In ‘Piercing the Skin of the Idol’, Pinney discusses the performative
embodiment of memory which occurs in the affective encounter with
such quotidian images, proposing the term ‘corpothetics’ to designate
‘the sensory embrace of images, the bodily engagement that most peo-
ple […] have with artworks’ (2001: 158). Proposed as ‘a critique of
conventional approaches to aesthetics’, Pinney argues for ‘a notion of
corpothetics—embodied corporeal aesthetics—as opposed to “disinter-
ested” representation which over-cerebralizes and textualizes the image’
(2004: 8). In the case of Arqueología, while at times the juxtaposition
of past images with the sons and daughters in the present does, in fact,
appear actively to draw attention to the artificially constructed nature of
the scene, foregrounding the projected photograph’s distortion when
superimposed onto the child’s face, body or clothes, this visual failure is,
nevertheless, transcended by the potential of the image’s ‘corpothetics’,
its bodily encounter between generations, and, as such, is not presented
as a failure characterised by mourning or melancholy. Significantly, while
some of the now-adult children do indeed offer solemn expressions, the
smiles and laughter of many of the participants, at times surrounded by
a family of their own, further gesture towards the ability of these photos
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to create new emotions and meanings in the present, privately eschew-

ing, at the same time, the child’s public position as a victim of his or her
parent’s disappearance. As García remarks, ‘Más allá del reclamo de res-
titución o de la denuncia de la pérdida, la tensa dialéctica de la mirada de
estas fotos viene a mostrar ya no sólo un presente atravesado por la ima-
gen fantasmática del pasado, sino también el gesto activo de construcción
de una mirada propia sobre ese pasado’ (Over and above a means of res-
titution or denunciation of disappearance, the tense dialectic of the gaze
in these photos comes to show not only a present pierced by the ghostly
image of the past, but also the present act of constructing a way of looking
at this past) (2011: 92–93, my emphasis).
It is, paradoxically, then, through the aesthetics of the failed encounter
that the creative potential of Arqueología emanates, transcending the vis-
ualised generational impasse with embodied images that refuse to dwell
on melancholy but instead point to the ‘event’ (Olin 2012) of photogra-
phy in the present. In his work on Quieto, Diego Genoud writes,
Ahora, padres e hijos se miran de reojo; ahora miran juntos hacia algún
rincón; ahora se desconocen y desconfían. A través de las miradas entablan
un nuevo, incipiente diálogo visual. Es un diálogo sin testigos ni intrusos
pero con interferencias, con ruido. No terminan de entenderse esas dos
generaciones. Un tornado los separa. Se miran desde las orillas de tiempos
distintos. […] Ahí están, a pesar de todo, esas fotos. Subsisten aunque no
ilesas. Y ese barro es justamente lo que les otorga su potencia. (2011: 7,
my emphasis)
[Now, parents and children cast one other a sideways glance; together they
now stare at the same corner of the room; they now fail to recognise one
another, they mistrust one another. Through these stares, they initiate a
new incipient visual dialogue; a dialogue without witnesses or intruders,
but with interferences, with noise. These two generations do not end up
understanding one another. A tornado separates them. They look at each
other from the banks of two separate times. […] In spite of everything, these
photos are there. They have survived, but they are not unharmed. And it is
precisely this damage that gives them their power.]
It is specifically this ‘damage’, the material evidence of the passing of

time in these faded and worn images, that underscores the significance
of the photograph’s materiality in the present. Ulanovsky’s image of a
suitcase, for instance, filled with framed and worn images (Fig. 5.5),
at once draws attention to our relationship with these photographs as
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196 G. Maguire
objects, not as part of a disembodied archive, and effectively gestures

towards the journeys we make with and through their physical presence.
It is, therefore, both as a result of and despite the indexical impossibil-
ity of bridging such a generational chasm that this ‘incipient visual dia-
logue’ may take place, occurring in a subjective time that Quieto herself
refers to as the ‘tercer tiempo’: ‘un tiempo inventado, onírico, ficcional,
una temporalidad propia en la que puede ocurrir la “ceremonia de
encuentro”’ (an oneiric, fictional, invented time, a distinct temporality
in which the ‘meeting ceremony’ may take place) (Longoni 2011: 4).
This devised ‘third time’ is, of course, metonymic for a wider rumina-
tion on cultural memory: a postmemorial approach that highlights the
fractures of the archival record and its inherent inability to communicate
a comprehensive experience of the past, and which then seeks to address
these fissures through an imaginative process that, in this case, celebrates
the materiality of the image and the subsequent possibility for an affec-
tive corporeal encounter with this embodied past. In contrast to the
absence of the bodies of the disappeared, it is, ‘in spite of everything’
as Genoud writes, only the physical presence of these photographs that
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remains. Indeed, as García remarks, it is ‘una fotografía a tres tiempos,

que refuta toda continuidad. […] La reflexividad de la imagen se replica
en la reflexividad de una memoria que se tematiza a sí misma’ (a pho-
tograph in three distinct times, which rejects any sense of continuity.
[…] The reflexivity of the image is met with the reflexivity of a memory
that focuses on itself) (2011: 95). While exposing the rupture between
generations and the restrictively indexical nature of the photographic
archive, Quieto and her contemporaries thus reveal an approach which
moves beyond the visuality of the image, interacting with the old and
faded photographs of their parents with a tactility and sensorial engage-
ment that reveal the neglected material significance of these images in
the present; that is, as physical, dynamic embodiments of that which has
been disappeared. If, as Jean Franco asserts in Cruel Modernity, ‘The
silence of the demonstrating mothers and the silence of the disappeared
were met by the silence of the authorities, all of which converged on the
silence of the photograph’ (2013: 195), then Quieto’s interventions into
the photographic archive are therefore an attempt to transcend the two-
dimensional silence of the previous generation. By creating new situa-
tions which fuse the materiality of the photograph with their own active
and present corporality, these artists thus revitalise their treasured family
images with a relevance for the present that acts, performatively, against
and outwith the indexical confines of the faded, torn and static images of
their parents’ disappeared past.
5.1.2 The Performative Index

In The Future of the Image, Rancière focuses his discussion of artis-
tic practice on the image, arguing against the postmodern declaration
of the ‘end of images’3 (2007: 18) and instead rethinking its qualities
by proposing a renewed perception—with a specific emphasis on pho-
tography—against the contemporary domination of the visual. As rep-
resentations of a past reality, photographs, argues Rancière, must be
thought of as ‘operations that produce a discrepancy’ (2007: 7) between
the past reality and the image itself. Significantly, it is these gaps, which
‘deliberately clarify or obscure an idea, […] which yield a meaning to
be construed or subtract it’, that lead Rancière to conclude, first, that
all ‘images of art are, as such, dissemblances’, and, secondly, that ‘the
image is not exclusive to the visible’ (2007: 7). Through a critique of
Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1997), Rancière condemns the critic
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198 G. Maguire
for insistently shrouding the image in ‘resemblance’ by way of the punc-

tum, understood, in Rancière’s terms, as the ‘immediate pathetic effect
that […] strikes us with the affective power of the that was’ (2007: 10).
Rancière writes:
[P]hotography, formerly accused of opposing its mechanical, soulless simu-

lacra to the coloured flesh of painting, sees its image inverted. Compared
with pictorial artifices, it is now perceived as the very emanation of a body,
as a skin detached from its surface, positively replacing the appearances of
resemblance and defeating the efforts of the discourse that would have it
express a meaning.
The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its
imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visible instead of the
figures of discourse – this is what is demanded by the contemporary cel-
ebration of the image or its nostalgic evocation: an immanent transcend-
ence, a glorious essence of the image guaranteed by the very mode of its
material production. (2007: 9)
Rancière argues that it is the very material presence of photography, the

medium through which such images are made possible, that has been
concealed behind the emphasis both on the punctum and the studium:
the former representing the ‘senseless naked presence’ of a spectator’s
personal engagement with a photograph, the latter functioning as its
polar opposite, the indecipherable ‘hieroglyph’ that draws spectator to
image. He continues:
Photography became an art by placing its particular techniques in the ser-

vice of this dual poetics, by making the face of anonymous people speak
twice over – as silent witnesses of a condition inscribed directly on their fea-
tures, their clothes, their life setting; and as possessors of a secret we shall
never know, a secret veiled by the very image that delivers them to us. […]
By projecting the immediacy of the [punctum] on to the process of mechan-
ical imprinting, [Barthes] dispels all the mediations between the reality of
mechanical imprinting and the reality of the affect that make this affect open
to being experienced, named, expressed. (2007: 15, emphasis in original)
In a similar manner to Quieto’s work, Gabriela Bettini’s collection

Recuerdos inventados (Invented Memories) (2002–2003) draws the
spectator’s attention to the ‘process of mechanical printing’ of which
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Fig. 5.6 ‘Mi tío Marcelo’, Recuerdos inventados, Gabriela Bettini
Rancière speaks, suggesting a new engagement with past images through

a sensory encounter beyond the confines of the indexical that allows for
an affective reconfiguration of the photographic archive. The photo-
essay, whose very title gestures towards the fabricated nature of any such
generational encounter, recasts the recognisable and static images of the
disappeared in current, and often humorous, situations (Fig. 5.6). The
almost parodic placement of the headshots onto the bodies of uniden-
tifiable actors is again a distinct break from the gravely solemn nature of
the photographs’ traditional usage in human rights discourse and, as Ana
Longoni asserts, ‘da cuenta de una tensión en particular entre pasado y
presente’ (accounts for a particular tension between the past and present)
(2011: 2). It is in this performance, fuelled by such tensions, that the
transferral of subjectivity from the son or daughter as a passive inheritor
of victimhood to the child as creative subject takes place, moving beyond
the visual to encompass the affective engagement with the past that such
bodily interactions may permit. While the images themselves appear to
be almost perversely unpolitical in their presentation of the past, it is,
for this generation, only by exposing the restrictive shortcomings of
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200 G. Maguire
conventional understandings of the archive and by revealing the poten-

tial of a performative approach that these images may remain influential
and active for present notions of politics. As Jacques Derrida contends in
Archive Fever, ‘As much and more than a thing of the past, before such
a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future.
[…] It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the
question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomor-
row’ (1996: 36). Through these performative interventions with the
archive, the members of the second generation are therefore able to
engage in contemporary politics, not only over the representation of the
image and the photograph’s materiality, but also a politics surrounding
the institutionalisation of the figure of the hijo and their own sense of
agency in relation to publicly co-opted narratives of the past. Indeed,
as discussed in the Introduction, while the inclusion of the Nunca más
report in Bettini’s initial photograph (Fig. 1.1) imbues the collection
with an assured sense of the political, the ensuing, parodic juxtaposition
of the one-dimensional past with the dynamism of the present further
points to the artist’s desire to reconfigure the position of the child in
relation to contemporary narratives of loss.
In ‘The Photograph and the Sound of History’, Edwards draws a par-
allel between the physicality of the photographic medium and the oppor-
tunity this presents to perform the image. ‘In this sense the distributed
personhood invested in the photograph is made material’, she writes, ‘in
that the photograph, through its indexical trace becomes an extension of
the person—the ancestor performed through physical engagement’ (2005:
40, my emphasis). Similarly, in ‘From Presence to the Performative’,
David Green and Joanna Lowry undermine conventional understandings
of the photographic index and argue that ‘the concept of the photograph
as a trace of a past does not exhaust our understanding of its indexical
properties. […] The very act of photography, as a kind of performative
gesture which points to an event in the world, as a form of designation
that draws reality into the image, is thus itself a form of indexicality’
(2003: 47–48). Green and Lowry go on to explain that the indexicality
of the photograph is therefore twofold, and that this performative inter-
action with the material object thus permits a destabilisation of its indexi-
cal boundaries. They continue:
These two forms of indexicality, the one existing as a physical trace of an

event, the other as performative gesture that points towards it, both invoke
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a relationship to the real that seems to be specific to the photographic

image. […] It seems to us that, while each of them promises a kind of
security in their relationship to the real, they also simultaneously subvert
that security and challenge our commitment to it. (2003: 48)
It is precisely through this performative index, or what Longoni refers

to as the ‘performance inesperada’ (unexpected performance) (2011: 1)
of Quieto’s oeuvre, that these photographers may indeed challenge the
indexical, ‘monumentalized significance’ (Young 1993: 15) of the fam-
ily photo in post-dictatorship Argentine society. James E. Young notes
in The Texture of Memory that the unaltered fixedness of such archival
documents constitutes ‘death over time: an image created in one time
and carried over into a new time suddenly appears archaic, strange, or
irrelevant altogether’ (1993: 47). By recontextualising these older pho-
tographs and revitalising their significance through such performative
interventions, Bettini and Quieto’s photographs may, therefore, be con-
sidered as ‘counter-monuments’, with the aim, in Young’s terms,
Not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not
to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passersby but to
demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite [their] own viola-
tion and desanctification; not to accept graciously the burden of memory
but to throw it back at the town’s feet. (1993: 30)
Similarly, ‘Reaffirming [a heritage]’, for Derrida, is precisely ‘to select,

to filter, to interpret, and therefore to transform; not to leave intact or
unharmed, not to leave safe the very thing one claims to respect before
all else’ (2004: 4, emphasis in original). By reinvesting the materiality of
the photograph with contemporary meaning and importance, Quieto
and the other photographers contained within this chapter not only
move beyond the conventional indexicality of the archival photograph,
exposing and undermining its affective insufficiency in communicating a
comprehensive experience of the past, but, through their creativity, they
also gesture towards the subjectivity of performance in its capacity to
‘reaffirm’ this past. ‘The repertoire requires presence’, writes Taylor: ‘[P]
eople participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by
being there, being a part of the transmission. As opposed to the suppos-
edly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do
not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreog-
raphies of meaning’ (2003: 20, emphasis in original). Indeed, while the
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202 G. Maguire
sons and daughters of the disappeared have often been accused of foster-
ing an unwillingness to understand the realities of their parents’ pasts,
this move beyond indexicality at once renders visible its inherent insuf-
ficiencies and thus forces us to rethink the ethical concerns inherent in
such criticism: that is, as the worn edges and faded images of these pho-
tographs point to their cherished, material importance for children of the
disappeared, and their emotive relationship to such loss, we are reminded
of the objective impossibility of such documents in providing a com-
prehensive story of their parents’ lives. In this way, by recognising the
dynamic role that the physical photo-object plays in the lives of the sec-
ond generation, we can thus avoid an emphasis on the ethics of histori-
cal engagement, recognising these performative interventions for what
they are: attempts from the repertoire of cultural memory to revitalise
the contemporary significance of such ‘archaic, strange, or irrelevant’
(Young 1993: 47) objects and, consequently, exert a sense of agency in
relation to this past, transcending notions of dependency and subjection
precisely, as Taylor writes, ‘by being there’.
5.1.3 Symbolisation and Spectatorship: The Politics of the Image

In Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Marianne
Hirsch discusses Art Spiegelman’s decision to incorporate photographs in
his graphic novel Maus, drawing attention to the question ‘of how dif-
ferent media—comics, photographs, narrative, testimony—can interact to
produce a more permeable and multiple text that may recast the problem-
atics of Holocaust representation and definitively eradicate any clear-cut
distinction between documentary and aesthetic’ (1997: 25). Moreover, by
moving between real photos of his father and cartoon drawings of mice
and cats, Hirsch argues that ‘Spiegelman lays bare the levels of mediation
that underlie all visual representational forms’ (25). In Filiación, Quieto’s
works of photographic collage gesture towards a comparable strategy
within post-dictatorship Argentina, as images from the private family col-
lection are, in a similar fashion, fictionalised; embellished and obscured,
that is, with leaves, drawings and distorted photographic juxtapositions
which produce, according to Mariana Eva Perez, ‘una foto de familia
monstruosa, desencajada, descoyunturada’ (a monstrous, dislocated and
disjointed family photo) (2013a). Indeed, while Perez ultimately con-
tends that ‘lo que queda de manifiesto es el propio artificio’ (what remains
evident is its own artifice) (2013a), these photos do, however, go much
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further than simply revealing the mediated processes at play in their idi-
osyncratic form of artistic representation. Ranging from the grotesque
to the humorous, these performative additions to the photographic sur-
face both celebrate fiction as a mode of moving beyond the gaps and
confines of the archive and, at the same time, emphasise the materiality
of the photo as the means of doing so. Furthermore, Quieto’s decision
to switch her focus from the conventional black-and-white photographs
used by human rights movements to unseen photos from her private
family album is also indicative of a wider and more recent generational
reconfiguration of the public position these children occupy as a result
of their parents’ disappearance. If, as Hirsch suggests in The Generation
of Postmemory, ‘The fragmentariness and the two-dimensional flatness
of the photographic image make it especially open to narrative elabora-
tion and embroidery, and to symbolization’ (2012: 38), then this section
will maintain that Quieto’s performative additions to these archival doc-
uments (and the ‘symbolization’ that consequently occurs) recovers the
three-dimensional materiality of the photograph as a means of distancing
the spectator and reinterpreting the place of public politics in the private
lives of these artists. It is, therefore, through a Rancièrian sense of ‘dis-
semblance’ that Quieto effectively mobilises the politics of the image,
rendering explicit the ‘operations that produce a discrepancy’ (Rancière
2007: 7) in order to forward a sense of contemporary engagement with
both a politics of the image and a politics of historical representation.
Significantly, the use of the photographic archive by the wider second
generation reveals a more profound generational attitude towards the
capacity of the archive in contemporary discussions of historical mem-
ory. In the opening and closing credits of Ávila’s Infancia clandestina,
for example, initial postcard drawings of stereotypical family photos are
replaced by their genuine photographic equivalents as the film draws to
a close. While Infancia clandestina sets itself apart, as discussed in the
previous chapter, from other films directed by the children of the disap-
peared through its explicit fictionalisation and total abandonment of any
diegetic documentary link whatsoever, these closing familial images—
linking many of the film’s supposedly fictional scenes with real-life pho-
tographed events—constitute the first and only biographical hint that
the director himself is in fact a child of the disappeared. For Gonzalo
Aguilar, the inclusion of these images ‘heightens the nucleus of truth of
fiction’ (2013: 20) and, as he continues, represents, alongside the use of
authentic television footage, a domination of the real by fiction:
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204 G. Maguire
These sequences define the shape of Infancia clandestina, that is, the doc-
umentary is subordinated to the fictional. In other words the evidence –
often traumatic, threatening remains – is absorbed by symbolization. This
means that symbolism ends up subordinating what is real and that the
indexical nature of evidence is suppressed in favour of the symbolic charac-
ter of the drawings. (21, emphasis in original)
Furthermore, in Semán’s novel Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China, the

‘symbolization’ of the documentary evidence of the author’s biological
connection to the disappeared, appearing in the text by means of a fam-
ily photograph, is again not used to augment the testimonial authenticity
of the text, but is instead employed to emphasise the failings of any such
archival documents in providing a comprehensive history of the past. ‘La
inclusión de los nombres y la foto me permitían generar el efecto con-
trario’, Semán contends: ‘[E]sa parte real hacía mucho más fuerte la fic-
cionalización de todo el resto. […] Las narraciones familiares son mucho
más atractivas y hasta más ricas que las fotos de un álbum’ (The inclusion
of names and the photo allowed me to generate the opposite effect—this
real part made the fictionalisation in the rest of the novel much stronger.
Family stories are much more attractive, and even richer, than the photos
from a family album) (Friera 2011).
Indeed, both Aguilar and Hirsch speak of the ‘symbolization’ of
archival material by the second generation, and of the ability to sub-
sume documentary evidence into a fictionalised narrative and suppress its
indexicality. In Quieto’s collages, the substitution of one face for another,
the montage of absent or disappeared family members, or the jarring jux-
taposition of photographs with hand-drawn backgrounds, not only serve
as a reminder of the foundational confusion that this unknown and dis-
appeared past exerts on the artist, but also highlight a personal desire
to reconfigure her memories, subjectively reorganising and taking com-
mand of images of a past that are at once unfamiliar yet affectively signifi-
cant. In one of the most recognisable images from Quieto’s collection,
a childhood photograph of the artist herself is covered with numerous
cut-out figures of her father, with one covering her left eye (Fig. 5.7).
While these figures may point to the various publicly available versions
of her father’s past (in a similar fashion to the numerous contradictory
stories Carri is told in the course of Los rubios), or to the inability Quieto
experiences in presenting herself through anything other than the lens
of her disappeared father, the collage contrasts greatly with a later image,
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in which a similar childhood photo of her father is obscured with leaves

and petals (Fig. 5.8). Juxtaposed against the documental fixedness of the
black-and-white image, the organic additions to the photograph’s surface
gesture not only towards the artist’s desire to uncover her roots but also
to the dynamic, living memory that obscures, dominates and enhances
the photograph in the present.
In Photos, Objects, Histories, Edwards and Hart discuss similar per-
formative engagements with family photographs, writing,
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206 G. Maguire
In some cultures it is sometimes the additive and interventionist tech-

niques applied to photographs that render the image complete and real.
[…] Overpainting and collage are integral to the meaning of the photo-
graph. They extend its indexicality, which is seen as a baseline for a pho-
tograph, not as the complete rendering of an identity; instead the identity
recorded in the photograph is extended and enhanced, revealing a form
of inner self through material surface additions to the photograph itself.
(2004: 13–14)
Driven specifically by the impossibility of burying her disappeared

father’s remains—which are also, according to Diana Taylor, part of the
memory archive, as ‘bones, […] items supposedly resistant to change’
(2003: 19)—Quieto intervenes in these old family photos and defies
the ostensible restrictions of archival objectivity by creating, what she
terms, ‘un entierro simbólico’ (a symbolic burial) (Quieto 2013) by way
of the image. ‘El collage es una herramienta que me da posibilidades de
armar, desarmar, buscar y juntar situaciones que tienen que ver tanto
con el archivo fotográfico (el documento) como con la fantasía’ explains
Quieto, closely echoing Taylor’s thoughts on the repertoire: ‘Para mí la
imagen tiene que ver con decir, expresar, reflexionar, construir la historia
personal. Yo lo hago a través de mi experiencia, a partir de aquello de
lo que yo puedo hablar’ (Collage is a tool that allows me to assemble,
disassemble, search for and join together situations that have as much
to do with the photographic archive (the document) as with fantasy. For
me, the image has to do with saying, expressing, reflecting, construct-
ing a personal story. I do this from my own experience, from what I can
talk about) (2013). Significantly, and a point which will be discussed at
greater length with reference to Lola Arias’ Mi vida después, this was a
desire borne directly from Quieto’s own experience of witnessing fellow
hijos discovering and burying the remains of their parents, noting all the
while ‘cómo se vivían estos momentos de intimidad con la particulari-
dad de que al ser desaparecidos se convertían en hechos políticos’ (how,
during these moments of intimacy, there was a distinct feeling that the
parents had become political entities in the moment of disappearance)
(2013). Intending, then, to recuperate something of the private from the
institutionalised figures of the disappeared, these collages thus function
as personal, creative performances that both attempt to reclaim these
figures from the public sphere and, at the same time, move beyond the
ethical confines of objective historical veracity in the negotiation of this
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highly influential past. By ‘reasserting the user as author’ through the

‘symbolization’ inherent in these material additions, it is, as Edwards and
Hart remark, ‘In many ways the [performative] materiality of people’s
photographs that make them “their own”’ (2004: 14).
Postmemorial work ‘[…] strives to reactivate and re-embody more
distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by
reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of medi-
ation and aesthetic expression’, writes Hirsch: ‘In these ways, less
directly affected participants can become engaged in the generation of
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208 G. Maguire
postmemory that can persist even after all participants and even their
familial descendants are gone’ (2012: 33). However, while Hirsch
states that ‘[u]nlike public images or images of atrocity, family photos
[…] would tend to diminish distance, bridge separation, and facili-
tate identification and affiliation’ (2012: 38), here these photographic
mediations point directly to the contrary. The humorous and child-
like collages within Filiación belie a more serious strategy on the art-
ist’s part: as these family photos are cropped, embellished and recast
in objectively impossible combinations, the colourful and juxtaposed
images do not, as Hirsch would suggest, playfully seek to engage ‘less
directly affected participants in the generation of postmemory’ (2012:
33), but, on the contrary, act as a parodic distancing device which
denies any such processes of identification. For Quieto, while the
presentation of previously unseen family photos may seem to indicate
a willingness to attract the public gaze, these collagistic additions do,
nevertheless, leave this gaze unable to engage in any sense of height-
ened spectatorial identification; moving beyond the restrictions of his-
torical and documental veracity, these highly subjective performances of
the family photo remain, in the end, publicly visible yet only privately
understood.
Indeed, while Robert Gaunt contends that in Quieto’s work ‘[t]here
is a move towards healing, but healing remains incomplete’ (2011: 67),
he fails to account for the distinct change in dominant subjectivity in
these photographs, overlooking the potential of such interventions to
refocus the camera lens on the present and overcome a restrictive and
dependent identity still based on the parents’ public significance as desa-
parecidos. He continues:
Quieto constructs not only analogies between generations that never met,
but also a broader analogy between those affected by the state atrocity and
those who view its representations. This is where Quieto’s work succeeds
in creating an equality and an analogy between victims and viewers. With
rare exceptions, most of us can relate to the experience of viewing a fam-
ily photo album. Instead of the alienating effects of shock and guilt that
reduce the effectiveness of images of suffering, Quieto creates an effect of
continuity between victims and viewers, and in doing so gestures to the
possibility of a shared world. (2011: 67)
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Though here Gaunt reads Quieto’s work as an unproblematic exam-

ple of postmemory, endowed with the potential to create what Hirsch
would term ‘adoptive witnesses’ (2012: 6), the ‘seductive depoliticized
sentimentality’ (Rojinsky 2014: 19) of his understanding of affiliation
must nevertheless be contested against the reconfigured politics con-
tained within Quieto’s images: a politics not of the past, but one of pre-
sent—and private—significance, directly related to both the position of
the hijo in contemporary society and, importantly, the availability of this
position for the surrogate appropriation by others. ‘La fragmentación
visual de estas representaciones logra conjurar dos peligros comunes:
[…] el de la identificación y el de la abstracción’, writes Blejmar in her
work on second-generation photography: ‘Ante estas imágenes quebra-
das no podemos sino experienciar una distancia irrecuperable entre esos
rostros y nuestro tiempo’ (The visual fragmentation of these represen-
tations manages to conjure up two dangers: […] that of identification
and that of abstraction. When faced with these broken images, we can-
not help but feel the irrecoverable distance between these faces and our
own) (2008: 204). Indeed, rather than using the familial paradigm as the
affective locus for affiliative strategies of generational mourning, Quieto’s
recourse to the domestic sphere and aesthetic distancing devices point
towards a reconfigured aspect of this postmemorial process in Argentina:
attempting to circumvent the dangers of abstraction and identification,
Filiación individualises the public figures of the desaparecidos within
their respective domestic settings and, at the same time, explicitly and
critically draws attention to the persistence and perversion of the public
gaze within the private. While the materiality of many of these photos
suggests an intimate, tactile interaction between disappeared parent and
child, this affective generational encounter remains, both literally and fig-
uratively, out of the viewer’s reach.
In Gustavo Germano’s Ausencias (2006), the retreat into the private
sphere is, similarly, not an attempt to recoil from public politics but to
expose such politicisation from the very nucleus of the now-fractured
family setting. Significantly, for Germano, the affective intensity of his
collection, in which past family photos are poignantly re-enacted in
the present by remaining relatives, with gaps left for those who have
been disappeared (Fig. 5.9), lies precisely in its ability to ‘despert[ar]
una conciencia de esa brutalidad acercándola o haciéndola “visible”
en el ámbito de lo más preciado: lo cotidiano, lo pequeño, lo propio’
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210 G. Maguire
(awaken an understanding of the brutality, or render such brutality

‘visible’, in the most valued sphere: the everyday, the small, the per-
sonal) (Ranzani 2008). As Valeria Durán likewise asserts in relation to
Germano’s work: ‘Estas imágenes hacen público un vacío que se mani-
fiesta inicialmente de modo privado y producen fisuras en los discursos
ya instaurados sobre la memoria. […] Al hacer público el espacio de la
intimidad, ellos lo transforman, en un gesto profundamente político’
(These images make an absence public, an absence that begins initially
in private and then produces fissures within conventional discourses
surrounding memory. […] By making this intimate space public, they
transform it through an act that is profoundly political) (2013: 169).
While Germano’s photographs include not only children but also sib-
lings and parents of the disappeared, it is, indeed, through this ‘pro-
foundly political’ act that the photographers contained within this
chapter seek to renegotiate their ‘espacio autobiográfico’ (autobio-
graphic space); a space in post-dictatorship Argentina, for Arfuch, which
is characterised by ‘ese umbral de visibilidad indecible entre público y
privado, […] un espacio entre que clausura la antinomia, revelando la
imbricación profunda entre individuo y sociedad’ (this threshold of vis-
ibility between the public and the private, […] a ‘between’ space that
resolves antinomy, revealing the profound imbrication between the indi-
vidual and society) (2002: 248).
In this way, photographic collections such as Filiación are thus able
to find new ways to problematise the ongoing and insidious effects
of the dictatorship period and, by refusing to dwell on the traumatic,
performatively shift the focus to present politics; politics not only
of memory and of the image, but also, critically, surrounding their
position both in contemporary Argentine society and in relation to
institutionalised narratives of loss. Indeed, while Hirsch contends that
‘[r]ecognising an image as familial elicits a specific kind of readerly
or spectatorial look, an affiliative look through which we are sutured
into the image and through which we adopt the image into our own
familial narrative’ (1997: 93), these contemporary interventions into
the Argentine photographic archive demand an alternative form of
spectatorship. Far from an unwillingness to engage in politics, distin-
guished by a return to the domestic sphere, the artists contained in
this chapter recognise the affective insufficiency of the official archive
and, by looking beyond the indexical restrictions of such politically
co-opted photographs and their conventional understanding as ‘[s]
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Fig. 5.9 Photograph from Ausencias, Gustavo Germano
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212 G. Maguire
mall, two-dimensional [and] delimited by their frames’ (Hirsch 1997:

38), focus on the continued contemporary effects of such militancy
through a physical engagement with the embodied past. This empha-
sis on the materiality of the photograph, either by reframing old pho-
tos in the present or adding to the image’s surface, allows for a new
conception of the photograph as a cultural object, signposting both a
transferral of subjectivity to the child and an appreciation—and val-
idation—of the new meanings and interactions that such an under-
standing may evoke. Ultimately, in usurping the presiding indexicality
of the two-dimensional photographic image, the familial scene is thus
performatively recast: with the camera lens focused firmly on present
politics, it is the children, and not their parents, who now perform
the principal role.
5.1.4 Conclusion
‘The experience of photographs, their meaning and impact, cannot be
reduced merely to a visual response’, writes Edwards : ‘Rather, they must
be understood as corpothetic, and sensory, as bearers of stories, and of
meaning, in which sight, sound and touch merge’ (2009: 45). While
contemporary conceptions of the photograph have tended to emphasise
the imagistic significance of the photo in post-dictatorship Argentina, as
indexical markers of loss and the ‘densest symbol’ in the human rights
movement’s ‘crusade for memory’ (Richard cit. Rojinsky 2011: 5), this
analysis has sought to provide a more productive reading, one in which
the very materiality of the photographs in question points to a new
understanding of their significance in the lives of the second generation.
In ‘Remembering Displacement: Photography and the Interactive Spaces
of Memory’, Tamara West claims that ‘[a]s much as the photographic
image may be understood through notions of the past or loss (or our
relationship to that loss), it is much more a part of the constantly mal-
leable construction of everyday life’ (2014: 178). By recognising the
present, everyday significance of these old and faded images, and by
moving beyond the confines of the indexical, this chapter has argued for
a renewed understanding of the generational legacy of the disappeared; a
heritage whose material presence in these collections urges us not only to
reconsider the child’s place in contemporary Argentine society but also
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
to rethink the physicality of the photographic medium against the back-

drop of contemporary cultural production.
In these altered, embellished and often irreverent family albums, the
artists’ material interactions are presented as attempts to refocus the
political gaze on the present and reclaim their parents from their posi-
tion as figures of national loss; ‘not as trite spectacle or a monument’,
as Rojinsky observes, ‘but as unfamiliar and consequently, a provocative
marker of the continued labour of memory in the present’ (2014: 6).
While this retreat to the domestic sphere and to familial paradigms of
intragenerational memory would, as Hirsch contends, facilitate increased
affiliative connections among the expanded postmemorial generation,
these photographic interventions show, in contrast, the enforced limits of
identification and the decidedly political nature of Argentine postmem-
ory. Indeed, as will also be discussed in relation to Arias’ Mi vida después,
such an emphasis on the private sphere does not represent a denial of
political engagement but, on the contrary, is symptomatic of an onto-
logical shift in the politics of memory and identity in recent Argentine
society, which places the stress firmly on the presentness of past loss and
on the continued difficulty of separating public politics from the domain
of the domestic. By transcending the semiotic restrictions of an indexi-
cal approach to photography and by eschewing the passive victimhood
of traumatic inheritance, these artists thus posit an understanding of
the ‘ongoing social biographies of images that remain entangled with
dynamic sets of sensory and social relations beyond and in excess of the
image itself’ (Edwards 2005: 42)—embodiments of the past, in other
words, which ‘reaffirm’, in Derrida’s sense, the children’s own contem-
porary position as legitimate social and political agents.
5.2 Part Two: Performing the Archive in Mi vida

después
‘[S]eis actores nacidos en la década del setenta y principios del ochenta

reconstruyen la juventud de sus padres a partir de fotos, cartas, cintas,
ropa usada, relatos, recuerdos borrados’, explains the playbill of Lola
Arias’ Mi vida después: ‘[La obra] transita en los bordes entre lo real y
la ficción, el encuentro entre dos generaciones, la remake como forma
de revivir el pasado y modificar el futuro, el cruce entre la historia del
país y la historia privada’ (Six actors born in the 70s and start of the 80s
reconstruct their parents’ youth from photos, letters, recordings, used
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214 G. Maguire
clothing, stories, hazy memories. The play unfolds on the borders of fact
and fiction, on the meeting between two generations, and looks to the
remake as a way of reliving the past and of modifying the future, at the
crossroads where national history and private history meet) (2009b). As
the performers fuse their own childhood memories with the imaginative
re-enactment of the lives and deaths of each other’s parents, the crea-
tive—and often parodic—register of the play continually finds its source
in the material engagement with these on-stage inherited objects. The
boundaries between invention and historical precision thus become
blurred, and the performative manipulation of archival documents in
these ‘remakes’ is presented not as means of recuperating fragments of a
disappeared past but as a tactile, material process in the present, endowed
with the capacity to engender new relationships in the lives of these chil-
dren forged out of contemporary concerns over identity, history and
politics.4 In an early scene entitled ‘Lo que me queda’, the actors stand
in a line and introduce their respective objects, listing not their emotive
importance but, one by one, emphasising merely their on-stage presence:
Mariano: Este es el grabador de cinta abierta de mi padre.

Vanina: Este es el expediente del juicio contra mi padre.
Carla: Esta es la última carta de mi papá.
Blas: A esta tortuga la heredé de mi papá.
Liza: Estos son todos los libros que escribió mi papá.
Pablo: Este es el super 8 que filmó mis padres. (17)
[Mariano: This is my father’s tape recorder.
Vanina: This is my father’s court record.
Carla: This is the last letter my dad wrote.
Blas: I inherited this turtle from my dad.
Liza: These are all the books my dad wrote.
Pablo: This is the Super 8 that filmed my parents.]
Presented initially as part of Vivi Tellas’ Biodrama cycle, a series of doc-

umentary theatre pieces centred around the recreation of performers’
pasts through personally significant objects, the play’s strongly material
engagement with the archive places Mi vida después firmly within the
project’s broader conceptual scope: ‘Después de casi dos décadas de sim-
ulaciones y simulacros, lo que vuelve en parte como oposición, en parte
como reverso’, affirms Tellas: ‘es la idea de que todavía hay experiencia,
y de que el arte debe inventar alguna forma nueva de entrar en relación
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con ella’ (After almost two decades of simulations and simulacra, what
returns, partly in opposition, partly as its foil, is the idea that there still
is experience, and that art must invent some new way of entering into
relation with it) (cit. Moreno 2009). In the scenes that follow, as these
familial objects are manipulated, altered and obscured, the performance
not only recasts the primary focus onto the contemporary experience of
the children, but it also exposes the semiotic restrictions of conventional
conceptions of the archive, subsuming any indexical link the documents
may retain with the past within a process of creative material engage-
ment firmly anchored in the present. Building on the previous discussion
of contemporary photography and moving beyond reductive notions
of subjectivity and historical irreverence, this chapter proposes that,
through the debunking of both the archive and conventional approaches
to testimony, Mi vida después evades a solely parodic approach to the past
in favour of a more meaningful present engagement with individual nar-
ratives of history. It is, therefore, through this dynamic on-stage relation-
ship with the archive, or what Tellas refers to as ‘el retorno de lo real en
el campo de la representación’ (the return of the real to the field of rep-
resentation) (cit. Moreno 2009), that the performers of Mi vida después
are able to resignify the postmemorial process, both rendering explicit
the objective impossibility of looking to the archive for a comprehensive
explanation of their own past and affording them a contemporary social
and political agency which recasts them in the principal roles of their
own familial history.
‘In documentary theatre, the performers are sometimes those whose
stories are being told’, writes Carol Martin in Dramaturgy of the Real
on the World Stage: ‘But more often than not, documentary theatre is
where the “real people” are absent—unavailable, dead, disappeared—
yet reenacted. They are represented through various means, including
stage acting, film clips, photographs, and other “documents” that attest
to the veracity of both the story and the people being enacted’ (2010:
17). Taking Mi vida después as a more complex example of such doc-
umentary theatre, in which roles are reversed and where ‘the real and
the simulated collide and where they depend on each other’ (Martin
2010: 2), this chapter will move beyond conventional readings of the
play’s testimonial capacity and its potential to transmit traumatic expe-
rience through affiliative postmemory. For Hirsch, in The Generation
of Postmemory, ‘affiliative postmemory’ denotes the ‘intragenerational
horizontal identification that makes [a] child’s position more broadly
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216 G. Maguire
available to other contemporaries’ (2012: 36); however, while the per-

formative archival engagements of Mi vida después may attract the spec-
tatorial gaze, at the same time, they impose identificatory limits through
both the fictionalisation of the self and the mediation and mediatisation
of live performance. Indeed, by eschewing a semiotic interaction with
these archival documents for an acknowledgement of their immediate,
dynamic and material presence in the lives of these sons and daughters,
Mi vida después paints a more nuanced picture of the position of the hijo
in post-dictatorship Argentina.5 ‘El retorno de la experiencia […] es tam-
bién el retorno de Lo Personal’, asserts Tellas: ‘Vuelve el yo, sí, pero es
un Yo inmediatamente cultural, social, incluso político’ (The return of
experience […] is also the return of The Personal. The self returns, yes,
but it is instantly a cultural and social Self, as well as a political Self) (cit.
Moreno 2009). As the play interrogates notions of community between
the audience and the performers themselves, the various levels of media-
tion on stage function as both a means of drawing attention to the con-
tinued contemporary pervasiveness of the public gaze into the lives of
these sons and daughters, and to the reluctance to allow such individual
‘cultural, social, even political’ engagements with the past to be sub-
sumed by the public sphere and institutionalised by the State.
5.2.1 Documenting Loss

‘At its most provocative, documentary theatre focuses on describing things
in the world while eliding the real, the live and the mediatised, creating a
critique of the systems of signs it cites’, writes Carol Martin in her contri-
bution to Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present: ‘At its best,
documentary theatre complicates the idea of documentary and of the real,
of a document, and even what it means to document’ (2009: 88). Over
the course of her article, Martin draws attention to the need to recognise
that contemporary ‘theatre raids media and captures it for its own pur-
poses’ (2009: 76), and, as such, highlights the consequent necessity of
‘shift[ing] the idea of documentary from a product to a process’ (2009:
89). In a similar fashion, in ‘The Promise of Documentary’, Janelle Reinelt
recasts the significance of the on-stage archival document, transcending an
understanding of the object as a mere semiotic indicator of past presence
and moving towards a more nuanced appreciation of its dynamic poten-
tial to facilitate affective encounters in the present. ‘The documentary is
not in the object but in the relationship between the object, its mediators
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[…] and its audiences’, she writes: ‘The experience of documentary is con-
nected to reality but is not transparent, and is in fact constitutive of the
reality it seeks’ (2009: 7, my emphasis). While the archival interaction that
characterises Mi vida después may be seen more generally as a recurring
feature in the work of Arias’ contemporaries,6 the immediacy of theatrical
performance and the ‘liveness’ of the documentary ‘process’ which takes
place on stage does seem, however, to provide a more explicit question-
ing of the archive’s semiotic restrictions. By undermining the indexical link
between sign and referent, discussed at further length later in the chap-
ter, and by complicating this semiotic ‘transparency’ through the creative
generational appropriation of images, clothing and books, Mi vida después
reconstitutes these documents as dynamic, potent objects endowed with
the capacity to act as the source of new performative potential in the pre-
sent. Indeed, as Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade assert in Performing
Archives/Archives of Performance: ‘Literally performing the archive attests
not only to a will to push the boundaries, but to a more fundamental
understanding of the archive as a medium and an organism rather than a
stable repository’ (2013: 22, my emphasis).
During the opening scene of Mi vida después, as a cascade of clothes
can be seen falling to the stage, followed shortly by Liza Casullo, daugh-
ter of the once-exiled Argentine philosopher Nicolás Casullo, the play-
ful attitude with which the children approach these inherited objects
over the course of the play swiftly becomes evident. As the performer7
emerges from the mound of clothing and tries on a pair of jeans, she
turns to address the audience:
Cuando tenía siete años me ponía la ropa de mi madre y andaba por

mi casa pisándome el vestido como una reina en miniatura. Veinte años
después encuentro un pantalón Lee de los setenta de mi madre que es
exactamente de mi medida. Me pongo el pantalón y empiezo a caminar
hacia el pasado. (1)
[When I was seven years old, I would put on my mother’s clothes and walk
around my house, stepping on my dress like a little queen. Twenty years
later I find a pair of 70s Lee jeans that my mother wore which are exactly
my size. I put them on and begin to walk towards the past.]
In this preliminary scene, after which all the actors enter and begin to
dress up in their parents’ clothes, the emphasis on clothing not only inno-
vatively broadens the repository of personal artefacts normally considered
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218 G. Maguire
as part of the archive of cultural memory in Argentina, but it also calls

attention to the more creative and personal engagement that character-
ises the play’s approach to the past. As discussed earlier, while many of
the older photographs in Lucila Quieto’s Arqueología resonate strongly
with their viewers due to their repeated use in the domain of human
rights, here the various items of clothing on stage in Mi vida después offer
the audience no immediate or recognisable indexicality whatsoever; this
attachment is, conversely, reserved only for the children of the garments’
owners. In his book Stuff, Daniel Miller observes that it is precisely the
personal, emotive significance of certain treasured objects, prompted by
their mere material presence in the lives of those who remain, which facil-
itates such individual processes of identification and engagement with the
archive. ‘Individuals’, writes Miller, ‘each in their own private domain,
have found their own way to understand how they can use stuff in deal-
ing with all kinds of loss’ (2010: 147). Moreover, with specific reference
to the role of clothing and other such ostensibly insignificant objects in
dealing with grief, Miller argues for recognising the essential importance
in the ‘mere consideration of things commensurate with the place they
evidently have in our lives’ (2010: 156). Indeed, more than just simple,
static snapshots of the disappeared past, the ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ presented
by the performers in Mi vida después effectively reveal a more dynamic
engagement with the past, surfacing as material triggers for present, per-
formative interpretations of each individual history.
In Dramaturgy of the Real, Martin draws attention to this shift in
contemporary theatre, from notions of historical authenticity in nego-
tiations of the past towards a more fundamentally subversive, non-rep-
resentational strategy of narrating cultural history. ‘How events are
remembered, written, archived, staged and performed helps deter-
mine the history they become’, she writes: ‘More than enacting history,
although it certainly does that, documentary theatre also has the capacity
to stage historiography. At its best, it offers us a way to think about dis-
turbing contexts and complicated subject matter while revealing the vir-
tues and flaws of its sources’ (2010: 17). Moreover, for Martin, although
the on-stage presence of those performers directly implicated by the story
offers a façade of testimonial authenticity, fundamentally differentiating
the genre from what she labels ‘fictive theatre’, it is, for her, precisely the
playful, initial claim on veracity offered by archival documents that can
then ‘directly intervene in the creation of history by unsettling the pre-
sent by staging a disquieting past’, thus enabling a piece of theatre to
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‘create its own aesthetic imaginaries while claiming a special factual legiti-
macy’ (2010: 18). For Susan Bennett, in her contribution to Theatre and
Autobiography, it is, similarly, the ‘coincidence between the subject of the
autobiographical performance and the body of the performer for that
script’ which produces a ‘frenzy of signification’ (2006: 35), an inten-
sification of claims of authenticity that, ultimately, renders such perfor-
mance capable of questioning its own construction. ‘[T]he lamination of
signifier to referent not only simulates a density of signs’, she writes, ‘but
also raises the question of “what is real here?”’ (2006: 35). Nevertheless,
in Mi vida después, while the actors quickly dispense of any biographical
authority by way of explicitly fictionalised dream sequences, comedy re-
enactments or parodic approaches to their parents’ past, the documen-
tary validity of the objects is also swiftly dispelled through their on-stage
subversion; it is, conversely, in the material interaction between the two,
the tactile ‘eventhood’ (Borggreen and Gade 2013: 379) of the archive’s
on-stage actualisation, that Arias chooses to problematise the very histori-
ography of the processes of biographical recreation at play.
In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, Liedeke Plate and
Anneke Smelik acknowledge that the emphasis on the creative potential
of the material object reflects a wider paradigmatic shift, discussed previ-
ously in this chapter with reference to the photo-object, which is charac-
teristic of the ‘performative turn’ (2013: 4). They write:
Memory is always re-call and re-collection […], and, consequently, it

implies re-turn, re-vision, re-enactment, re-presentation: making experi-
ences from the past present again in the form of narratives, images, sensa-
tions, performances. Foregrounding the work of memory, the active labour
of remembering and of forgetting, brings the focus on its creative aspect
and functions theoretically to push representation beyond its borders as just
representing meaning. (2013: 6, my emphasis)
It is, precisely, in this turn from the solely indexical to creative potential,
achieved through the material appreciation of the objects on stage, that
Mi vida después is able to reconfigure the archive’s capabilities, allowing
it, in Arias’ own words, to ‘hablar de lo que pasa en el presente, de dejar
de revivir el pasado’ (speak about what is happening in the present, to
stop reliving the past) (2009b). Indeed, while the stage directions them-
selves repeatedly underline the importance of the tactile interactions
between performer and object, instructing, for example, ‘Blas manipula
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220 G. Maguire
las fotos’ (Blas handles the photos) (2) ‘Mariano y Blas manipulan obje-
tos y fotos delante de la cámara’ (Mariano and Blas handle objects and
photos in front of the camera) (3), and ‘los actores suben a la panta-
lla, mueven objetos’ (the actors go up to the screen and move objects
around) (9), it is the live engagement on stage, beyond the control of
the text, in which the move from semiotic significance to performative
engagement is realised. During the scenes in which Blas recounts his
family history, parodically focusing on details of the life of his inherited
turtle rather than his father’s disappearance,8 the comedy of the situation
belies a more serious change in focus from the parents’ generation to the
present:
Blas: Esta tortuga se llama Pancho y nació en el mismo año que mi

papá. […] Para llegar a los sesenta años esta tortuga sobrevivió a
muchas catástrofes: en el 82 se salvó de la inundación muy grande que
hubo en Chascomús, mi papá la pisó con el auto yendo en marcha
atrás pero a ella no le pasó nada, en el 2001 se le cayó una persiana
encima, pero resistió y el año pasado durante los ensayos, se cayó del
escenario pero no le pasó nada.
Mi mamá es astróloga y dice que las tortugas son seres milenarios que
pueden predecir el futuro.
Carla: ¿Si le hacemos una pregunta sobre el futuro responde?
Blas: Claro. Hacé una pregunta.
Carla: En la Argentina, en el futuro, ¿va a haber una revolución? (19)
[Blas: This turtle is called Pancho and he was born in the same year as
my dad. […] To get to his 60, this turtle had to survive many catas-
trophes: in ’82 he was saved from a huge flood in Chascomús; my
dad drove over him when reversing but nothing happened to him;
in 2001, a blind fell on him, but he survived; and last year, during
rehearsals, he fell off the stage, but he was absolutely fine.
My mum is an astrologist and she says that turtles are millenary crea-
tures that can tell the future.
Carla: If we ask him a question about the future, will he respond?
Blas: Ask him something.
Carla: In the future, will there be a revolution in Argentina?]
As the on-stage camera focuses on the turtle, slowly moving towards one
of the chalk-drawn responses of ‘SI’ or ‘NO’, the entire scene functions as
a synecdochic indicator of the play’s broader approach to the recent past:
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the animal, presented as a significant (and inherited) component of Blas’

familial heritage, functions as the archival object par excellence, ostensibly
embodying the past and yet simultaneously engaging creatively with the
future. In her work on contemporary Argentine theatre, Brenda Werth
reads the combination of animals, child actors and chaotic music scenes
in Mi vida después as ‘strategies for incorporating unpredictability [which]
generate awareness in spectators of the lack of control that characterises
human life and of the fragility that defines not only humanity but also
the narratives that transmit human experiences from generation to gen-
eration’ (2010: 195). The analysis contained within the present study,
however, reads Arias’ innovative approaches in a more productive light.
By moving beyond notions of historical authenticity and the ‘fragility’ of
cultural memory, these unscripted material interactions point directly to
the creative potential of the archive in the present, resignifying and reaf-
firming, in the previously mentioned Derridian sense, its inherent capacity
to keep such memories relevant and consequential. It is for this reason
that Mi vida después is able to remain both emotively dynamic and pres-
ently significant, capable of assuring, in Arias’ own words, that ‘la vida
de los performers tiene que ver con que sea un acto verdaderamente con-
temporáneo y no un arte del pasado’ (2009b) (the life of the performers
means that this is a truly contemporary act, not an art of the past).
5.2.2 Changing Scripts: The Futurity of the Archive

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida questions the contemporary notion
of the archive, tracing the term’s trajectory from its Greek etymologi-
cal roots9 to its present relationship with both conceptions of the future
and the future itself. For Derrida, the archive’s significance is constantly
and contingently transformed by present social, political and technologi-
cal forces, and, consequently, he writes, ‘As much and more than a thing
of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question
the coming of the future. […] The question of the archive is not […]
a question of the past. It is a question of the future, the question of the
future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a respon-
sibility for tomorrow’ (1996: 33–36). Through a discussion of Freud’s
psychoanalytic interpretation of the archive, Derrida’s vision is presented
as a dynamic repository that mutates and expands to include all distinct
permutations, incorporating not the ‘original’ event itself but the subjec-
tive traces of its various interpretations. He writes:
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222 G. Maguire
By incorporating the knowledge deployed in reference to it, the archive

augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas. But in the same
stroke it loses the absolute and meta-textual authority in might claim to
have. One will never be able to objectivize it with no remainder. The archi-
vist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It
opens out of the future. How can we think about this fatal repetition, about
repetition in general in its relationship to memory and the archive? It is easy
to perceive, if not to interpret, the necessity of such a relationship, at least
if one associates the archive, as naturally one is always tempted to do, with
repetition, and repetition with the past. But it is the future that is at issue
here, and the archive as an irreducible experience of the future. (67–68)
In Mi vida después, the archival document’s ‘fatal repetition’ is ren-

dered explicit through many of the actors’ individual interventions, per-
formatively engaging with the on-stage objects through a process which
enhances, reconfigures and recontextualises its ‘eventhood’ in the present.
In a scene entitled ‘Las mil caras de mi padre’, Vanina, the daughter of a
military officer and sister to an illegally adopted brother, discusses a selec-
tion of family photos, consecutively displayed on the on-stage screen in
front of the audience. As she recalls the dates and circumstances of the
photographs, another of the performers defaces them, circling moustaches
or drawing arrows to indicate the 3-year-old Vanina’s gaze. She says:
1976. Mi tío, mi abuelo y mi padre. Todos policías. Tienen cara de

policías, bigotes de policías, actitud de policías.
[…]
1978. Yo a los tres años mirando cómo mi madre baña a mi hermano. En

la foto se puede ver que yo estoy feliz pero confundida. No entiendo bien
de dónde vino mi hermano porque no recuerdo haber visto a mi mamá
embarazada.
1980. Yo y mi hermano abrazados. Él es la persona que más quiero de mi

familia. Siempre fuimos muy parecidos: ojos verdes, pelo marrón, y hasta la
misma sonrisa, pero hace 5 años nos enteramos de que no somos herma-
nos de sangre.
[…]
1983. Mi padre y yo en un trampolín. Siempre que miro esta foto me pre-

gunto por qué él se pone del lado más seguro y me deja a mí en el borde.
Parece que yo estuviera a punto de caer. (2–3)[My uncle, my grandfather
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
and my father. All policemen. They have policemen faces, policemen

moustaches, and policemen attitudes.
[…]
1978. Me, at three, watching how my mother bathes my brother. In the

photo you can see that I’m happy but confused. I don’t really understand
where my brother came from because I can’t remember seeing my mum
pregnant.
1980. Me hugging my brother. He is the person I love the most in my

family. We always looked alike: green eyes, brown hair, and even the same
smile, but five years ago we found out that we aren’t blood siblings.
1983. My father and me on a trampoline. I always look at this photo and

ask myself why he was on the safest side and I was at the edge. It looks like
I’m about to fall off.]
In a similar fashion to the collage work of Quieto’s Filiación, by inter-

acting with the images, adding to their surface and emphasising certain
aspects over others, the semiotic boundaries of the photographs are thus
breached and they become present, informed indicators of the perform-
er’s contemporary attitudes towards the recent past. Reconsidered in
light of the events that have happened since they were taken, the recon-
ditioned photos in this way become examples of Derrida’s ‘fatal repeti-
tion’: ‘The strange result of this performative repetition the irrepressible
effectuation of this enactment, in any case what it unavoidably demon-
strates, is that the interpretation of the archive […] can only illuminate,
read, interpret, establish its object, name a given inheritance, by inscrib-
ing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and enriching it enough to
have a rightful place in it. There is no meta-archive’ (1996: 67, emphasis
in original).
Still, while such performances of photographic documents often take
advantage of their position as ‘the archival medium par excellence’ and,
through their material presence, capitalise on their ability to ‘stir up
and criticise the archive’ (Borggreen and Gade 2013: 283), the broader
incorporation of unconventional documentary objects in Mi vida
después points to a more fundamental subversion of the archive. While
there is often a vocalised distrust of the archive’s supposed authority, for
example when Carla discloses that ‘en mi vida escuché tantas versiones
sobre la muerte de mi papá que es como si mi papá hubiera muerto
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224 G. Maguire
varias veces o no hubiera muerto nunca’ (I’ve heard so many versions

of how my dad died it’s as if he died many times, or not at all) (13), it
is, however, frequently the manner in which the play incorporates these
objects that offers a more nuanced critique of their supposed objectiv-
ity. Interestingly, the on-stage screen, which displays both these archival
interactions and the actors’ re-enactments of their parents’ deaths, fre-
quently becomes the central focus of the performance, at times even the
only access the spectator has to the actions of those on stage. As Anne
White-Nockelby asserts in her discussion of the technical aspects of the
play, ‘Además de los múltiples planos de la voz en primera persona, las
técnicas documentales […] crean planos distintos a través de su presencia
en un escenario que siempre representa una realidad pero que no es la
realidad misma’ (As well as the multiple planes of the first-person voice,
the documentary techniques […]create different planes through their
presence on a stage that always represents a reality but is not reality itself)
(2011: 4, emphasis in original). Similarly, as Lorena Verzero contends
while discussing a scene in which Liza directs the other performers to
recreate her parents’ engagement live on-screen, ‘En esta escena la reali-
zación de la película constituye la presentación de una acción que ostenta
el artificio en un doble plano: el de la realización fílmica y la teatral que
la contiene’ (In this scene, the filming of the movie represents an action
that flaunts its artifice on two levels: that of filmic representation and that
of the theatre in which it takes place) (2011: 214). However, while both
critics align this artificiality with a more general parodic playfulness on
the part of the director, they fail to account for how the (hyper)media-
tised character of such representations reveals a more foundational reflec-
tion on the indexical nature of the documents in question. More than
an explicit portrayal of ‘la fragmentación del yo [en el] espacio visual del
escenario’ (the fragmentation of the self [in the] the visual space of the
stage) (White-Nockelby 2011: 4), or ‘la exposición de la primera persona
distanciada de su propia historia’ (the distancing of the first person from
his/her own story) (Verzero 2011: 215), the mediatised nature of the
archival material in Mi vida después goes further in radically undermining
any dominant notion of testimonial authenticity for both the performers
and the archive. While video recording has been conventionally seen as a
means of objectively capturing the past, used in second-generation films
such as Nicolás Prividera’s M to imbue a sense of historical authentic-
ity, here Arias exploits the screen as a way to emphasise not a testimo-
nial account of the individual performers’ stories, but the present, creative
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
interaction between actors and objects. Moreover, both against and

despite these explicit levels of mediation, the screen visually accentuates
the material existence of the object in the present, or rather the imma-
nence of its ‘eventhood’, as the source of an emancipatory performative
potential, capable of productively transcending such static, obsolete con-
ceptions of the archive and of moving the performance towards a ‘live’
actualisation of meaning.
In his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip
Auslander discusses the value of live performance in a society dominated
by the proliferation of mass media, contending that the live event—thea-
tre, sports events, music concerts, etc.—has now become inseparable
from technologies of reproduction, each one a mere replication of the
other.10 Following Walter Benjamin, Auslander argues that ‘live per-
formance has indeed been pried from its shell and […] all performance
modes, live or mediatized, are now equal: none is perceived as auratic or
authentic; the live performance is just one more reproduction of a given
text or one more reproducible text’ (1999: 55). In a similar—yet par-
allel—fashion to Derrida’s notion of the archive, Auslander asserts that,
due to mediatisation’s intrusion ‘in[to] the forms and cultural position of
performance’ (1999: 27), any attempt at representing an ‘original’ event
is futile. He writes:
Live performance has become the means by which mediatized representa-

tions are naturalized, according to a simple logic that appeals to our nostal-
gia for what we assumed was the im-mediate: if the mediatized image can
be recreated in a live setting, it must have been ‘real’ to begin with. This
schema resolves (or rather, fails to resolve) into an impossible oscillation
between the two poles of what once seemed a clear opposition: whereas
mediatized performance derives its authority from its reference to the
live or the real, the live now derives its authority from its reference to the
mediatized, which derives its authority from its reference to the live, etc.
(1999: 43)
While in Mi vida después the re-enactment of various scenes from the

lives of the performers’ parents may seem to express a nostalgic loss
for a disappeared past, this latent subversion of the archival document
refuses to take such loss as the narrative impetus of the play, recognising
the constructedness of both the on-stage performance and the archive,
and appropriating this realisation as the emancipatory source of creative
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226 G. Maguire
potential in the present. More than ‘configur[ing] a new artefact that

travels from the private to the public to stage an archive of vulnerabil-
ity, loss, pain, and laughter in a unique generational remix’ (Sosa 2010:
5–6), Mi vida después liberates the performers from the constraints of
their inherited past and affords them a performative agency in the pre-
sent. Furthermore, the screen, in this sense, also serves to offer a sense
of voyeurism for the audience, underscoring their position as consum-
ers of these children’s pasts through the visual re-enactments of some
of the previous generation’s most intimate moments. If, as Marianne
Hirsch contends, that ‘[t]o grow up with such overwhelming inherited
memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or
one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences
displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation’ (2012: 5),
then Arias’ play unmasks and denies such an inheritance and, instead,
focuses on the materiality of the object as the source of contemporary—
and private—significance, precisely, for the lives that come after.
5.2.3 Postmemorial Politics and the Repertoire of Loss

‘[S]i bien los actores exponen en público su vida privada, nunca dejan de
advertir el carácter artificial de esa exposición’, writes Jordana Blejmar,
discussing the authenticity of the testimonial self in Mi vida después:
‘Acaso sea ésta una forma de preservar algo de la intimidad perdida como
resultado de la invasión del terrorismo de Estado en las casas de cada
familia, además de evitar el efecto ilusorio de identificación entre los per-
formers y la audiencia’ (If indeed the actors present their private lives in
public, they do not refrain from warning the audience about the artifi-
cial character of such a presentation. Perhaps this is a way of preserving
something of a lost sense of intimacy, which is a result of the invasion
of State terrorism into the houses of each family, as well as avoiding any
illusory effect of identification between performers audience) (2010).
In the course of her article, Blejmar contends that the explicit lack of
emotion displayed while engaging with some of these inherited objects,
for example during the scenes in which we hear a tape-recording of
Mariano’s father or see a home video from Pablo’s childhood, is symp-
tomatic of a broader motivation on the part of the sons and daughters to
‘recuper[ar] esa capacidad de sus padres de ser alguien en privado y otra
persona en público’ (recuperate this ability of the parents to be someone
in private and someone else in public) (2010). As this book has argued,
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
the second generation’s reluctance to allow their private, personal

engagements with the past to be subsumed within the collective sphere is
the source not only of a desire to interrupt processes of affiliative identifi-
cation, but also, more forcefully than Blejmar suggests, of a much greater
political reflection on the continued presence of the State in the domestic
sphere. From the outset of the play, there is a clear acknowledgement of
this incursion into the lives of the children, as the performers reveal the
year they were born and interweave their own familial circumstances with
important political events, continually unable to dissociate one from the
other. In this scene, entitled ‘El día en que nací’, they announce:
Carla: 1976. Se declara golpe militar y un mes después nazco yo. Soy un
bebé muy rebelde. Mi mamá me pone de nombre Carla por mi padre
Carlos que era sargento del Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo.
[…]
Pablo: 1983. Vuelve la democracia. Nace mi hermano gemelo y 10 minu-

tos después nazco yo. Mi madre, para poder diferenciarnos, nos pone una
cintita, una roja y una azul: azul peronista y rojo radical. Pero mis padres
no se interesan por la política y trabajan en el Banco Municipal de la Plata.
(1–2)
[Carla: 1976. A military coup is declared and one month later I am born.
I’m a very rebellious baby. My mum gave me the name Carla because of
my dad, Carlos, who was a sergeant in the People’s Revolutionary Army.
Pablo: 1983. Democracy returns. My twin brother is born, as am I ten

minutes later. My mother, in order to tell us apart, puts a little ribbon on
us, one red and one bluePeronist blue and Radical red. But my parents
aren’t interested in politics and they work for the Municipal Bank in La
Plata.]
Similarly, as the play draws to a close, the final scene, entitled ‘El día de
mi muerte’, explicitly recapitulates this tension, and is differentiated from
the initial stories of their birth through a parodically dystopian vision of
Argentina’s future. Again, reflecting the performers’ inability to abstract
the domestic from the political or imagine a future free from the ubiqui-
tous gaze of the State, the scene reads:
Carla: Muero en agosto del 2016 de un derrame cerebral. Para esa

altura, la Argentina forma parte de la República Bolivariana, un territorio
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228 G. Maguire
autónomo e independiente de Estados Unidos y Europa. Mi único hijo

varón será un soldado defensor de la República.
[…]
Vanina: Yo muero el 25 de agosto de 2035 en un accidente de autos. Para

ese momento, la Argentina sigue siendo igual que ahora. Los mismos pres-
identes, las mismas luchas sociales, el mismo conflicto entre el campo y la
ciudad. (24–25)
[Carla: I die in 2016 from a brain haemorrhage. At this point, Argentina is

part of the Bolivarian Republic, an autonomous and independent territory
of the US and Europe. My only male child will be a defence soldier for the
Republic.
[…]
Vanina: I die on the 25 August 2035 in a car accident. At this time,

Argentina is the same as it is now. The same presidents, the same social
battles, the same conflict between country and city.]
While various critics read these scenes as ‘build[ing] an intergenerational

artefact of transmission of trauma in which the spectators are invited
to take part’ (Sosa 2012: 226) or as ‘involv[ing] the public in a collec-
tive act of memory and mourning’ through ‘a ritual […] of interpella-
tive power’ (Perez 2013b: 15), the sustained intrusion of the political
in the play, and the parody and derision with which it is treated, ges-
tures towards a more complicated presentation both of the public/
private divide and any collateral processes of experiential affiliation.
Indeed, while Sosa claims in an earlier article that Mi vida después ‘pro-
vides a space for exploration of traumatic remembrance in a shared space
and time [and] recalls the idea of a public forum which bears witness
to unexpected affects emerged in the aftermath of trauma’ (2010: 20),
she overlooks not only the private and concealed material significance of
the personal artefacts on stage, but also presumes the medium of the-
atre to enable a straightforward communication of experience through
the embodied performance of memory. To be sure, while the clothes
and books on stage allow for an immediate interaction with the past for
the child, the audience remains, resolutely, excluded from this affective
encounter. As Auslander contends in his discussion of live theatre and
spectatorial identification in Liveness:
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Another version of this account of the appeal of live performance proposes

that live performance brings performers and spectators together in a com-
munity. This view misunderstands the dynamic of performance, which is
predicated on the distinction between performers and spectators. Indeed,
the effort to eliminate that distinction destroys the very possibility of per-
formance.
[…]
The experience of theatre (of live performance generally, I would say) pro-
vokes our desire for community but cannot satisfy that desire because per-
formance is founded on difference, on separation and fragmentation, not
unity. Live performance places us in the living presence of the performers,
other human beings with whom we desire unity and can imagine achiev-
ing it, because they are there, in front of us. Yet live performance also
inevitably frustrates that desire since its very occurrence presupposes a gap
between performer and spectator. (1999: 65–66)
While Sosa declares that ‘[u]ltimately the piece suggests that the ones
who have been affected by the dictatorship are not only the familial vic-
tims but also those who behold the touch of the past and assume it in
their bodies’ (2010: 20) and that ‘[the audience] may not have been
directly affected by violence, but still they can adopt those stories and fill
them with their own experience’ (2012: 226), this understanding rep-
resents an overly simplistic view of such live performances of memory.
Though Auslander later claims that theatre performances ‘can provide
the occasion for a satisfactory experience of community within the audi-
ence’, he ultimately maintains that ‘live performance inevitably yields a
sense of the failure to achieve community between the audience and the
performer’ (1999: 66, emphasis in original). As has already been argued,
by foregrounding processes of on-stage mediatisation and archival medi-
ation in Mi vida después alongside the material, tactile interactions with
personal objects, the play gestures not towards an active identification
between performer and spectator; instead, this ostensible feeling of com-
munity is undermined by the fictionalised selves on stage, concealing
and denying access to the private, individual engagements with the past
through the mediation of theatrical performance.
Derrida contends that ‘[n]othing is more troubled and more trou-
bling [than the archive]. […] The trouble of secrets, of plots, of clandes-
tineness, of half-private, half-public conjurations, always at the unstable
limit between public and private, between the family, the society, and
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230 G. Maguire
the State, between the family and an intimacy even more private than
the family, between oneself and oneself’ (1996: 90). Poised unstead-
ily between both spheres, as Dierdre Heddon similarly remarks in
Autobiography and Performance, ‘The autobiographical and the political
are interconnected: the vast majority of autobiographical performances
have been concerned with using the public arena of performance in
order to ‘speak out’, […] aiming to challenge, contest and problema-
tize dominant representations and assumptions about those subjects’
(2008: 20). In Mi vida después, these personal articulations of postmem-
ory do not represent a straightforward embracing of the public gaze,
but point to ‘[p]erformance, then, as a way to bring into being a self’
(Heddon 2008: 3), which then both criticises such intrusions into the
private sphere and questions dominant conceptions of the hijo. While
Mariana Eva Perez criticises the use of postmemory in her study of Mi
vida después because ‘it runs the risk of veiling or overlooking [the per-
formers’] diverse first-hand experiences’ (2013b: 14), it is precisely these
deeply personal memories which are intentionally reserved from pub-
lic view, parodied, mediated and, as such, rescued from the spectato-
rial gaze through the ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’
(Hirsch 2012: 5) of the postmemorial process. Indeed, though Perez
rejects postmemory as a valid critical framework for similar works from
this generation, her alternative argument paradoxically rests firmly on the
paradigm’s central tenets. ‘The play can be considered as offering testi-
monies about the consequences of state terror not as it was in the past,
but as it figures in the present’, she writes: ‘It is not one or another, first-
hand experience versus inherited memories. […] It is both at the same
time’ (2013b: 14). It is, therefore, through an appreciation of the politi-
cal elements of Argentine discourses of postmemory, and a move beyond
simplified notions of affiliative identification and experiential transfer
among the wider generation, that the paradigm may be at its most use-
ful—exposing the particularities of the Argentine situation, in which
these mediated, mediatised and material interactions with the past both
draw attention to the pervasive gaze of contemporary society and, at the
same time, combat such incursion by retaining something of the personal
which cannot be appropriated for the purposes of fashioning affiliative
narratives of collective loss.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
5.2.4 Conclusion
‘With documentary theatre, the domains of the archive and the reper-
toire are interwoven reminding us that new media creates [sic] radically
different ways of understanding and experiencing embodiment’, writes
Martin in Dramaturgy of the Real: ‘What makes documentary theatre
provocative is the way in which it strategically deploys the appearances
of truth while inventing its own particular truth through elaborate aes-
thetic devices’ (2010: 19). Though Mi vida después is presented initially
as an attempt to recreate the past through the documental authenticity
of various inherited family heirlooms, the ostensible authority of both
the objects and actors on stage is quickly undermined as the play reveals
itself to be more concerned with the ‘truth’ of the present resignifications
of the archive than the past it may indexically appear to represent. As
clothes are tried on, pictures defaced, and death scenes comically reen-
acted, the play offers an innovative generational approach to the embod-
ied performance of memory. In line with Bennett’s assertion that, in
reference to autobiographical on-stage performances, ‘[t]he body, above
all else, makes these performances both more and less reliable than their
written equivalents, for it claims a special purchase on the real, incites
the evidence of the past, and promises, for the audience, a three-dimen-
sional text’ (2006: 46), it is, indeed, the performative, material engage-
ment between the performers and their inherited objects that delivers Mi
vida después’ most significant reflections on the dynamism of the archive.
As Barbara Hodgson argues in relation to the re-performance of past
documents as a move beyond archival ontology: ‘[T]o play again in the
archive entails an active apprehension that, by creating networks of con-
figuration, archived documents are released from the house arrest that
Derrida sees as their intractable condition to give performance remains a
present presence. In such work lies another way of telling, and writing, a
deeply material performance history’ (2012: 388).
While the performers of Mi vida después re-enact scenes of their par-
ents’ militancy and intimate moments from their lives, the archival docu-
ments on stage cease to be carriers of any strictly indexical or referential
truth and, instead, become objects with the capacity to create a dynamic
understanding of the continued effects of this past in the present. This
is not, however, as certain critics have contended, a performance which
aims to open up this experience for an affiliative process of experiential
transfer; it is, conversely, one in which present concerns over the public
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232 G. Maguire
co-option of intimate familial loss are explored and reinvested with a

material, personal significance that consolidates the distance between the
affective engagements happening on stage and the audience’s inability to
experience or share in such private memories. ‘My point is simply that
communality is not a function of liveness’, writes Auslander: ‘The sense
of community arises from being a part of an audience, and the quality
of experience of community derives from the specific audience sensation,
not from the spectacle for which that audience has gathered’ (1999: 65).
Indeed, rather than a means of communication, or of affectively shar-
ing the experience of interacting with cherished, family objects, as one
would traditionally expect from documentary theatre, Arias instead uses
the play’s performative relationship with the past to advance a broader
political statement on the continued incursion of the public gaze into the
private sphere. In this new configuration of the archive, fuelled by a post-
memorial concern over the collectivisation in individual experience, it is,
therefore, the subjective and personal ‘eventhood’ of the documentary
object that takes centre stage, and not the disappeared past it may osten-
sibly appear to represent.
5.3 Conclusion: Beyond Archive Fever

‘The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant’, writes
Derrida, ‘we will only know in times to come. Not tomorrow, but in
times to come, later’ (1996: 36). The dynamic and renovative nature
of Derrida’s conception of the archive, as open to reinterpretation and
to reconfiguration, is reflected in the interplay between performer and
object in the works discussed in this chapter. As these sons and daugh-
ters interact with inherited documents from the previous generation,
there is a distinct denial of any exclusionary emphasis on the objects’
potential function as semiotic indicators of absence; instead, the per-
formers creatively accentuate the present ‘eventhood’ (Borggreen and
Gade 2013: 379) and contemporary importance of these archival heir-
looms in their lives. For Quieto, Bettini and Ulanovsky, the reframing of
old photographs of the disappeared within new contexts not only pro-
vides an effective counter to the widespread public use of these images
in the post-dictatorship sphere of human rights, but it also expresses the
cherished, private materiality which these photographs possess outwith
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
any indexical focus on loss. As Geoffrey Batchen suggests in Forget

Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, ‘[T]o induce the full, senso-
rial experience of involuntary memory, a photograph must be trans-
formed. Something must be done to the photograph to pull it (and us)
out of the past and into the present’ (2004: 94). In a similar fashion,
the on-stage manipulation of familial objects in Mi vida después points
to a comparable undermining of conventional understandings of the
archive. However, in this case, Arias expands her repository to include
not only photographs but also clothes, books, animals and other unu-
sual, yet personally important, objects of the cultural archive. The playful
and parodic character of the ensuing interactions with the past, and of
the reenactment of significant milestones from the lives of the previous
generation, exposes a reluctance to be restricted by notions of archival
indexicality and, instead, incorporates these documents within the wider,
creative process of a postmemorial narration of historical memory.
There is, however, despite the artists’ differing levels of aesthetic
innovation and imaginative interaction with the archive, an underly-
ing, shared sense of contemporary political engagement which pervades
the staged performances of these cultural texts. While Marianne Hirsch
describes the ‘performative index’ (2012: 48) as the inherent register
of all articulations of postmemory, here these archival reconfigurations
respond to the political specificities of the Argentine case, performatively
disclosing present tensions over the position of these sons and daughters
in relation to dominant public narratives of their parents’ deaths, and the
continued spectacularisation of the figure of the hijo within post-dicta-
torship society. As old photographs of the disappeared are recast in the
present, and past episodes from their lives are re-created on stage, these
forged generational encounters not only exhibit a transferal of agency
to the second generation but also demonstrate a desire to impose iden-
tificatory limits on the affiliative appropriation of their discrete experi-
ences of state violence. In this way, these artists display an awareness of
the position of the hijo as both a private and a public form of identity,
and subsequently mobilise this duality in their postmemorial—and thus
political—performances of historical memory. As Valeria Durán states in
reference to contemporary Argentine photography: ‘Hoy aparece como
imperiosa la búsqueda de lo privado, que acentúa los rasgos que los
definían [a los desaparecidos] ya no como militantes, sino como padres,
amigos, hermanos. […] Si bien trabajan sobre lo privado, estos ensayos
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234 G. Maguire
son mostrados en el espacio público, tejiendo lazos—o haciéndolos visi-

bles—entre ambos espacios’ (The search for the private appears as urgent
today, accentuating the aspects that defined the disappeared not as mili-
tants but as parents, friends, siblings. […] If indeed they work with the
private space, these photo-essays are shown in public, weaving links—or
rather making them visible—between both realms) (2013: 168). The
retreat to the domestic sphere, therefore, does not represent an irrev-
erent reluctance to engage in politics, but constitutes a postmemorial
exposition of the difficulty these hijos experience in separating the public
and the private in the context of post-dictatorial Argentina.
In Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, Heike Roms claims
that ‘[w]hat Derrida has suggested about the nature of the archive is
equally true for that of the legacy. […] A legacy is an ambiguous present,
[it] remains associated with the giver. By giving it away, she ensures the
legacy will be hers’ (2013: 40). In the works included in this chapter,
however, the evident ontological shift in conceptions of the archive, from
a stable repository of meaning to a dynamic vehicle for present concerns,
unveils a latent desire to move beyond the restrictive referentiality of
any such generational dependence. Indeed, more than a sense of archive
fever, which Derrida describes as ‘a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic
desire for the archive’ (1996: 91), the members of the second genera-
tion discussed here do not simply assume a role as secondary guardians
of their familial legacy; instead, they place an emphasis on the present,
material interactions which undermine conventional interpretations of
such documents as markers of loss and, at the same time, creatively cast
themselves as the principal interlocutors of such cultural heritage. As
Diana Taylor asserts in The Archive and the Repertoire, ‘Embodied per-
formance, then, makes visible an entire spectrum of attitudes and val-
ues. The multicodedness of these practices transmits as many layers of
meaning as there are spectators, participants, and witnesses’ (2003: 49).
In staging these relationships with the previous generation, these sons
and daughters transform their archival documents from public indexes of
a past violence to present, material and dynamic objects which reimbue
the disappeared with an individual and private significance: political acts
of performance, that is, which are presented not as detrimental to the
archive, but as essential to keep the repertoire of cultural memory rel-
evant and meaningful in contemporary Argentina.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Notes
1. In Fotos tuyas, Ulanovsky photographs nine families and investigates
the relationship that these parents, siblings and children have with the
images of their disappeared or assassinated relatives. This photo (Fig. 5.1)
forms part of a series that includes Gershanik’s sister, Alicia, who is pho-
tographed holding and looking through old photographs, along with a
brief hand-written testimonial of the circumstances surrounding her
brother’s death.
2. While, as this chapter argues, the inclusion of old photographs in this
context engenders new affective encounters between child and parent in
the present, it must be pointed out that the practice of photographing
relatives contemplating images of the dead ‘es la técnica artística para-
digmática para evocar al ausente’ (is the paradigmatic artistic technique
used to evoke absence), and is as old as the medium itself (Fortuny 2014:
106). See Fortuny (2014) for an extended discussion in the Argentine
context.
3. Rancière argues that ‘the end of images is behind us’ (2007: 17), referring
to the dominant understanding in contemporary culture that regards the
proliferation of images to have rendered the image itself devoid of mean-
ing (2007: 1). Instead, he proposes an aesthetics of the image that rec-
ognises its continued significance beyond the indexical: ‘What the simple
contrasts between the image and the visual, or the punctum and studium,
propose is the mourning for a certain phase of this intertwinement—that
of semiology as critical in thinking about images’ (2007: 18).
4. It should be noted, at the outset of the discussion, that the play is in a
constant state of ‘remake’; that is, as events happen in the lives of the per-
formers, Arias includes them in the script of the play. The present study is
based on a version of the play received in personal correspondence with
the playwright in early 2013.
5. It should also be noted that not all of the performers in Mi vida después
are specifically children of the disappeared; Vanina is the daughter of a
military officer, a problematic connection that is explored in the play
through references to her brother, who was appropriated from his parents
after their disappearance and brought to live with her family.
6. Consider, for example, the engagement with documents and books in Los
rubios (2003) , public records and photographs in M (2007), letters in El
premio (2013), or photographs and toys in Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva
China (2011).
7. Arias prefers to use the term ‘performers’, rather than ‘actors/actresses’.
As Pamela Brownell states: ‘[E]n general, [Arias] prefiere hablar de per-
formers y no de actores para referirse a los intérpretes de sus obras. En
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
236 G. Maguire
el caso de Mi vida después, cuando se habla de actores se alude principal-

mente al oficio de estos performers también fuera de la obra’ (In general,
[Arias] prefers to talk about performers and not about actors when refer-
ring to those who take part in her plays. In the case of Mi vida después,
when we talk of actors it is in reference to the profession of the perform-
ers who take part in the play) (2009: 4, emphasis in original).
8. In this episode, Arias chooses specifically significant dates in Argentina’s
history, thus heightening the parody: the dictatorial repression in the late
70s; the Falklands/Malvinas conflict in 1982; and the economic crisis of
2001.
9. Derrida discusses the two distinct meanings of the term ‘Arkhē’, writing:
‘This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle
according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical,
historical, or ontological principle—but also the principle according to
the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social
order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological
principle’ (1996: 1).
10. Auslander draws on Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts in Simulations to describe
the contemporary relationship between the live and the mediatised. He
quotes: ‘Nothing separates one pole from the other, the initial from the
terminal: there is just a sort of contradiction into each other, a fantastic
telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another: an
IMPLOSION’ (Baudrillard 1983: 57).
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gwm23@cam.ac.uk
CHAPTER 6
Conclusion: The Politics of Postmemory
During a visit to the Dachau concentration camp in 2005, shortly after

his inauguration as President, Néstor Kirchner commented on the simi-
larities he perceived between the Holocaust and Argentina’s Dirty War,
remarking to a Spanish journalist: ‘Es comparable. Con otras dimen-
siones y otros métodos de eliminación’ (The situation is comparable.
To a different extent and using different methods of elimination) (cit.
Obarrio 2005). Capitalising on the opportunity to garner public support
for his plans to re-open the ESMA as an ‘espacio de la memoria’, the
President later declared: ‘Hay que fijar la memoria, aunque me critiquen,
aunque me cueste. […] Hay que hacerlo; hay que hacerlo cuanto antes.
Lo que pasa es que en la Argentina la sociedad no quiere asumir lo que
pasó’ (We must focus on memory, even if I get criticised, even if it proves
difficult. […] We need to do it; we need to do it as soon as possible. In
Argentina society does not want to come to terms with what happened)
(cit. Obarrio 2005). For Beatriz Sarlo, in La audacia y el cálculo, this
visit to Dachau not only exposed the President’s ignorance towards the
historical specificities of the Holocaust, and particularly the debates sur-
rounding its comparison with other cases of state genocide, but it also
reflected a more fundamental characteristic of his Presidency—namely,
in her view, the considerably politicised co-option of cultural memory,
legitimised through a close working relationship with key actors in the
domain of human rights. ‘No es necesario ser un especialista en historia
alemana para tener por lo menos una vaga idea de la existencia de esa

gwm23@cam.ac.uk
242 G. Maguire
polémica, que no fue sólo académica sino pública’, wrote Sarlo: ‘Todo
esto no forma parte del mundo de Kirchner, que se consideró más allá
del bien y de mal simplemente por su alianza con los organismos de
derechos humanos’ (It is not necessary to be a specialist in German his-
tory to have even the slightest idea of the polemics that surround the
issue, which are not only academic but also public. All of this is not part
of Kirchner’s world, who considers himself above good and evil simply
because of his alliance with human rights organisations) (2011: 186–
187). For Sarlo, any such superficial comparison of the violence orches-
trated by the two administrations constitutes a reductive approach that
negates their fundamentally distinct motivations and historical effects.
She writes:
La dictadura militar asesinó sin ser un régimen nazi; inventó figuras como
la del desaparecido, novedosas en la historia de la represión local e inter-
nacional, así como los nazis tuvieron que organizar una forma hasta enton-
ces desconocida de matanza industrial, pero esos dos inventos no acercan a
un régimen respecto al otro ni habilitan a comparar un campo de concen-
tración con un chupadero argentino. En ambos lugares […] esos asesina-
tos fueron impulsados por imaginarios de muerte y de exterminación muy
diferentes. […] Todo esto debe seguir siendo estudiado porque lo único
que no admite es un sistema de equivalencias fácil, que es inservible tanto
para entender a Dachau como a la ESMA. (187–88)
[The military dictatorship murdered people without being a Nazi regime;

the dictatorship invented figures like the desaparecido, which were entirely
new in terms of local and international repression, just like the Nazis had
to organise an as-yet unknown manner of industrial killing; however, these
two inventions do not bring each regime closer to one another nor per-
mit a comparison between Nazi concentration camps and Argentine chu-
paderos. In both places […] these killings were driven by very different
ideologies of death and extermination. […] All of this needs to continue
to be studied because the one thing we cannot allow is a system of facile
equivalences, which is as unhelpful in the study of Dachau as it is in the
study of the ESMA.
As this study has shown, it is precisely through a critical acknowledge-

ment of the political and historical specificities of the Argentine case
that the paradigm of postmemory, developed elsewhere and appropri-
ated in a range of contexts, may yet prove to be a productive and appro-
priate framework for approaching the works of the post-dictatorship
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
6 CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF POSTMEMORY 243
generation. While there are indeed similarities to be drawn between the

post-Holocaust and post-dictatorship generations in terms of their aes-
thetic and ideological engagements with the cultural memory of vio-
lence, discussed at length in Chap. 2, the distinctly political impetus and
realisation of Argentine expressions of postmemory not only reflects the
historical realities of 1970s left-wing militancy but also responds to the
institutionalised co-option of such national trauma in the era of contem-
porary Kirchnerist politics.
In Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen stresses the importance of a
local approach to memory practices: ‘It is important to recognize that
although memory discourses appear to be global in one register, at their
core they remain tied to the histories of specific nations and states. […]
The political site of memory is still national, not post-national or global.
[…] Although the Holocaust as a universal trope of traumatic history
has integrated into other, nonrelated contexts, one must always ask
whether and how the trope enhances or hinders local memory practices
and struggles, or whether and how it may help and hinder at the same
time’ (2003: 16, emphasis in original). In historicising concepts of mem-
ory and postmemory within the cultural and political contexts of recent
Argentine society, this book has offered a set of new and potentially
provocative readings of the works chosen for study, emphasising three
principal shifts which characterise the cultural production of this post-
dictatorship generation. First, the study has explored how these authors,
directors and visual artists attempt to destabilise the governmentally
endorsed and essentialised image of the hijo within the domain of human
rights, offering diversified interpretations of their ostensible generational
responsibility towards the past and combating the subsumption of indi-
vidual narratives of loss within the collective public sphere. Secondly, and
consequently, the analysis has called for a shift in critical attention from
psychoanalytic theories of trauma and loss to a heightened appreciation
of the political nature of the work of this generation; recognition, that is,
not only of these texts’ engagement with the identity politics of human
rights organisations and the Kirchner governments, but also, for exam-
ple, of the rehistoricisation of the figure of the militant, the critique of
ongoing issues of social exclusion and state violence, and the condemna-
tion of the sustained prevalence of the State within the private sphere.
Lastly, the book has displayed a sensitivity towards the innovative and
creative formal and aesthetic choices deployed by this post-dictatorship
generation, drawing attention to the performative, subjective approaches
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
244 G. Maguire
to historical memory which blend the realms of fact and fiction, and fre-
quently genre, through a process often characterised by humour, fantasy
and parody. As such, though the work of this generation has been the
target of criticism over a perceived irreverence towards the past, typified
by a playful, and even perverse, approach to the historical memory sur-
rounding their parents’ militancy, The Politics of Postmemory argues that
the engagement with memory exhibited by these texts points not to a
dehistoricised reading of the past but rather to a discretely repoliticised
postmemorial engagement with the past’s present meanings.
While Sarlo’s criticism of Kirchner’s actions in Dachau is, for the most
part, overstated in the course of her discussion, her unease with his official
interactions with human rights organisations points, more broadly, to one
of the most discernible tensions of the Kirchnerist administration within
the cultural sphere. As discussed in the third chapter of this book, the close
association that Néstor fostered with these organisations after his election
and his frequent public declarations of support for their activism ‘d[io]
un paso principal en su propia invención política’ (was a first step in his
own political invention) (Sarlo 2011: 189). In the same vein, Alejandro
Moreira has remarked that any such governmental co-option of the work
of human rights groups has the dangerous potential to imply a resolution
of the past, closing it off as ‘una secuencia más […] de la historia nacional’
(just one more episode in the country’s history) (2009: 69). Referring spe-
cifically to Argentina and to Kirchner’s time in office, Moreira writes:
En otras palabras, el gesto del Presidente de la República cierra un capítulo

de la historia, pero se abre una paradoja, esto es, la posibilidad cierta de
que el triunfo en el plano del derecho y la justicia pueda servir para consu-
mar aquello que no lograron ni los militares ni los gobiernos constitucion-
ales que los sucedieron: desaparecer otra vez los desaparecidos. Desparecerlos
como singularidad pensable–como portadores de valores, prácticas e ide-
ologías revolucionarias– al tiempo que se los erige en víctima sufriente,
objeto de piedad y de compasión. (2009: 69, my emphasis)
[In other words, the actions of the President of the Republic closed a
chapter of history, opening up a paradox: namely, the possibility that the
successes in the fields of law and justice may serve to carry out that which
neither the military nor the successive constitutional governments could
do—disappear the desaparecidos all over again. Disappear them as individ-
uals—as bearers of revolutionary values, practices and ideologies—at the
same time as setting them up as suffering victims, as objects of pity and
compassion.]
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
The works included in this book seek, to varying degrees and in distinct
manners, to contest the collectivisation and homogenisation of these
individual experiences of familial loss and violence. While both Félix
Bruzzone and Mariana Eva Perez, for example, explicitly counteract the
politicised activism of human rights organisations and the ‘renewed’ dis-
appearance of their parents at the hands of contemporary society, other
works have provided a more indirect exploration of the State’s contin-
ued appropriation of the domestic narratives of loss. From an explora-
tion of the effects of the previous generation’s militancy on their sons
and daughters in Infancia clandestina and El premio to the ideological
reframing of public photographs of the disappeared in recent Argentine
photography, all these works point implicitly to the problematic ‘disap-
pearance’ of the private, individual experience of being a child of the dis-
appeared.
As the Introduction to this book suggested, one of the most foun-
dational texts of the post-dictatorship generation has been Albertina
Carri’s Los rubios, released in the same year that Kirchner assumed
the Presidency. Just as Mariana Eva Perez contends that ‘[había] una
puerta que nos abrió Albertina Carri, por la que entramos varios detrás’
(Albertina Carri opened a door for us, and many of us followed her
through) (cit. Aguirre 2012), Félix Bruzzone has similarly stated that
‘Los rubios fue una punta de lanza, de quiebre, en esto de olvidar un
poco la experiencia de nuestros padres, que tuvo sus éxitos y fracasos,
y narrar la nuestra’ (Los rubios was a starting point, a point of fracture,
for setting to one side our parents’ experience, with all its successes and
failures, and starting to tell our own) (cit. Rebossio 2012). Interestingly,
the director herself has said: ‘Si la película se hubiese estrenado en 2001
la habrían desestimado como “otra película sobre desaparecidos” y si se
hubiese estrenado en 2005 me habrían tratado de oportunista […]. Creo
que tuvimos la suerte de hacerla en el momento justo’ (If the film had
been released in 2001, they would have dismissed it as ‘just another film
about the disappeared’, and if it has been released in 2005, they would
have treated me like an opportunist […]. I think we were lucky enough
to make it at just the right time) (Carri 2007: 110). In this sense, as
this study has shown, the specific context for the genesis and evolu-
tion of this generation demands to be read with a sensitivity towards its
political nature; a politics, that is, surrounding not only the essentialised
figure of the hijo at the beginning of the Kirchner era, but also the indi-
vidual perspectives of these children in relation to the public co-option
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
246 G. Maguire
of their own familial histories in the context of human rights activism.

Furthermore, at a time when interpretations of the past began to play a
significantly enhanced and more pronounced role in the public sphere
through the re-opening of trials against military officers and the forma-
tion of certain public sites of memory, the texts from the post-dictator-
ship generation have thus presented an alternative means of approaching
this past, contesting dominant emphases on the experience of the previ-
ous generation with, as Bruzzone claims, a move to ‘narrar la nuestra’
(narrate our own experience). In her discussion of Los rubios, Gabriela
Nouzeilles asserts that this drive to enact an explicit and critical distance
from the ideologies and militancy of the previous generation, along with
the decision to do so through a subversion of accepted modes of nar-
rating the past, is, fundamentally, ‘the film’s most powerful contribution
to critical thinking’ (2005: 267). This study has shown how the texts
included in this book respond to the evolving political and social back-
drop of the Kirchner era by developing and diversifying the aesthetic
and ideological innovations addressed by Carri’s Los rubios. In refin-
ing the documentary’s self-reflexive approach to cultural memory or, in
often provocative and polemical ways, building on its playful, ostensibly
impudent approach to historical narration, these works from the post-
dictatorship generation have continued to build on Carri’s foundational
influence and have repositioned the individual, private experience of
being a child of the disappeared alongside dominant contemporary dis-
courses of Argentina’s recent past.
‘Lo que se ha perdido, en fin, es la relación crítica con la experiencia
de los setenta’, writes Moreira: ‘En nuestro caso, historizar los setenta
significa indagar sin complacencias los contenidos de una apuesta rev-
olucionaria, y no tratar a sus militantes como ingenuos, ni como idio-
tas trasnochados, pero tampoco como héroes’ (What has been lost, in
short, is a critical relation with the experience of the 70s. In our case,
historicising the 70s means coldly investigating the events of a revolu-
tionary gamble, not treating its militants as naïve, or as archaic idiots,
nor as heroes either) (2009: 84). To be sure, while this generation exhib-
its an increasing agency in relation to the narration of their own per-
sonal histories, revealing a desire to shift the focus from their parents’
experiences to their own understandings of the contemporary effects of
such history, this study has also outlined the more nuanced examina-
tions of the past that this allows. As Chap. 4 has argued in relation to
Benjamín Ávila’s Infancia clandestina and Paula Markovitch’s El premio,
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
the formal decision to recount the domestic incursions of militancy

through the eyes of a child, for example, not only posits the perspectives
and emotions of the hijo in an affectively potent and original manner,
but also, significantly, seeks to justify such narrations as both an entirely
appropriate and necessary means of repoliticising our conceptions of the
past. While Rita de Grandis has claimed in relation to earlier second-
generation films that ‘the dissolution of ideological critique results from
an intimate, character-driven focus, centred on the (supposedly) inno-
cent figure of a child protagonist’ (2011: 251), the young characters in
Ávila and Markovitch’s films foreground an ability to diversify dominant,
homogenised societal and political conceptions towards this past precisely
because of an emphasis on this alternative, independent way of viewing
the past. Moreover, these texts also make a significant contribution to
the way cultural memory, and more specifically postmemory, is viewed
in the Southern Cone. The child’s gaze in these films does not function
as a prism for presenting the mediation and fragmentation of the act of
remembrance as overt indicators of the failures of memory in creating an
authentic experience of the past; instead, it appears as a vehicle for expos-
ing the productive, dialogic nature of postmemory and its ability to tran-
scend emphases on trauma and victimhood with a creative approach to
the past that celebrates diversity of perspective and the rich multiplicity
of the postmemorial narrative. ‘[P]ostmemorial witnesses are subject to
different, if always overlapping, modes of “remembering”’, Hirsch con-
tends in The Generation of Postmemory: ‘These events happened in the
past, but their effects continue in the present’ (2012: 82, 5).
One of the central objectives of this book has been not only to reflect
the aesthetic and ideological diversity of the postmemorial perspec-
tive but also to examine the dynamic formal approaches and generic
playfulness that characterise the work of the post-dictatorship genera-
tion in Argentina. In particular, Chap. 5 analysed works of photogra-
phy and documentary theatre from Lucila Quieto, Gabriela Bettini, Inés
Ulanovsky and Lola Arias, drawing attention to how the destabilisation
of conventional generic boundaries can, in itself, initiate an innovative
critique of dominant historical discourses in contemporary Argentine
society. As a corpus characterised by its self-reflexivity and subjective, dia-
logic approaches to cultural memory, the works in this book, thus effec-
tively reflect the country’s changing and ‘complex memoryscape’ (Werth
2010: 10), the arena in which issues of victimhood and loss are com-
plicated by the frictional—or perhaps non-existent—boundaries between
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
248 G. Maguire
the private and public spheres of post-dictatorship Argentina. In ‘Viral

Affiliations’, for instance, Cecilia Sosa indicates the powerful impact of
social media on the facilitation and direction of such debates, noting as
a primary example how a Facebook campaign on the anniversary of the
military coup in 2010 drew attention to the public co-option of such pri-
vate notions of loss and absence. As Sosa explains, the campaign involved
Facebook users, whether related to the disappeared or not, removing
their profile pictures to leave an empty space as ‘a sign of commemo-
ration and resistance’ (2014: 78). ‘Can the seemingly minor gesture of
removing one’s Facebook profile picture be conceived of as a local emer-
gence of evolving forms of memory?’, she questions, before suggesting
an answer: ‘[T]he Facebook controversy shed light on a broader dispute
that still remains silenced in contemporary Argentina: the question of
who bears the legitimacy of remembering in the aftermath of violence’
(76, 82). This book has placed such questions of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘evolv-
ing forms of memory’ firmly within the social and political backdrop
from which they have emerged, contesting Sosa’s claim that such shifts
within contemporary cultural memory ‘stress an empowered concep-
tion of mourning, which shows how grief [can] contribute to building
new communities of “with-ness”’ (86). By refusing to read these indi-
vidual texts in line with the critical consensus surrounding the affiliative
transfer of traumatic experience and loss, I have shown how the cur-
rent generation of authors, directors and visual artists imbue their works
with a sense of personal and private significance that resists their collec-
tivisation within broader narratives of victimhood and, instead, points
to the ongoing tensions between the intrusion of the public gaze and
their desire to reclaim an intimacy and privacy in their relationship with
the past. ‘¡Explotó el 24 de marzo en facebook! ¿Cómo ejercitamos la
Memoria? ¿Cambiamos la foto de perfil por la silueta con la clásica ley-
enda Nunca Más o por la foto de tu desaparecidx favoritx?’, writes Perez
in one of her typically parodic blog posts, reflecting on the deperson-
alised, dehistoricised nature of the language and activism of contempo-
rary human rights organisations: ‘En twitter no prende, pero el muro de
facebook se me llena de siluetas, desaparecidos, pañuelos, nuncamases,
todo el merchandising. […] Fin de la jodita de las redes sociales’ (The
24 March exploded on Facebook! How should we exercise our Memory?
Should we change our profile picture for a silhouette with the classic
slogan ‘Never Again’, or for a picture of our favourite desaparecido? On
Twitter, it didn’t really take off; my Facebook feed, though, was full of
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
silhouettes, desaparecidos, white scarves, neveragains, all the merchandise.

[…] I’ve had it with all these bloody social networks) (2012: 70–71).
It is within these innovative and subversive approaches to form, genre
and content, and the self-reflexive, subjective and even parodic attitudes
towards recent cultural memory, that Argentina’s post-dictatorship gen-
eration transforms the past into a source of critique for present debates
over identity and politics. The authors, directors and artists discussed
within this book refuse to let their own individual narratives of loss and
absence become subsumed and depersonalised within the shifting public
discourses of memory or consigned to the past as unquestionable, closed
chapters of textbook history. As Moreira writes:
Lo que se pierde, las más de veces, es la especificidad del caso que nos toca.
Desde esa perspectiva, lo acontecido en la Argentina de los setenta con-
cluye por ser un ejemplo más –un pie de página– de otras tantas historias
acaecidas en el siglo XX, lo que quizás no sea enteramente incorrecto pero
nos hurta la experiencia, es decir, todo lo que en verdad importa: si lo que
ocurrió ya ha ocurrido antes, poco queda por pensar. En suma, la lectura
académica ejercida en tales condiciones produce sin duda ciertas aproxima-
ciones relevantes, ofrece nuevos marcos de inteligibilidad, pero en defini-
tiva se queda ahí, en el umbral, sin poder ofrecer patrones de lectura que
aferren la historia argentina en su singularidad. (2009: 77)
[What is lost, more often than not, is the specificity of our own case. From
this perspective, what happened in Argentina in the 70s ends up being just
one more example—a footnote—of countless other 20th century events,
which may not be entirely incorrect but robs us of our experience; that
is, everything that truly matters: if what happened had already happened
before, then there is not much left to think about. All in all, academic
research carried out in such conditions no doubt produces certain relevant
comparisons, offering new frameworks to understand the situation, but
it does not, in the end, go further than this, remaining on the threshold
without offering new ways of reading that embrace Argentine history in its
own right.]
In moving beyond a sole emphasis on the politics of memory, the sub-

ject of continued debate throughout Argentina’s post-dictatorship
era, The Politics of Postmemory has shown how the cultural production
of this generation is intricately linked to a broader political critique of
contemporary politics in the Kirchner era. Ultimately, it is the affec-
tive and dynamic engagements with cultural memory performed by this
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
250 G. Maguire
postmemorial generation that allow their parents’ experience of state

violence to acquire an active meaning in the present. These texts point
insistently to the highly politicised operations of postmemory in the
Argentine context, in which the identity and experience of the hijos have
been continually co-opted by human rights discourses, political propa-
ganda, cultural texts of all kinds, as well as, of course, by critical and the-
oretical approaches to postmemory.
References
Aguirre, Osvaldo. 2012. ‘La historia en clave de género menor’. La Capital.
http://www.lacapital.com.ar/ed_senales/2012/10/edicion_195/conteni-
dos/noticia_5040.html. Accessed 26 Nov 2014.
Carri, Albertina. 2007. Los rubios: cartografía de una película. Buenos Aires:
Artes Gráficas Buschi.
de Grandis, Rita. 2011. ‘The Innocent Eye: Children’s Perspectives on the
Utopias of the Seventies (O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias, Machuca,
and Kamchatka)’. In The Utopian Impulse in Latin America, ed. Kim
Baeuchesne and Alessandra Santos, 235–258. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual
Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Moreira, Alejandra. 2009. ‘Nuestros años setenta: política y memoria en la
Argentina contemporánea’. In Crítica del testimonio: ensayos sobre las relaciones
entre memoria y relato, ed. Cecilia Vallina, 66–97. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz
Viterbo.
(3): 263–278.
Obarrio, Mariano. 2005. ‘En Dachau, Kirchner reforzó su idea de los museos
de la memoria’. La Nación. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/696875-endachau-
kirchner-reforzo-su-idea-de-los-museos-de-la-memoria. Accessed 26 Nov
2014.
Perez, Mariana Eva. 2012. Diario de una Princesa Montonera- 110% Verdad.
Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual.
Rebossio, Alejandro. 2012. ‘Desacralizar el dolor de la dictadura argen-
tina a través de la literatura’. El País. http://cultura.elpais.com/
cultura/2012/09/18/actualidad/1347956618_808535.html. Accessed 26
Nov 2014.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. 2011. Kirchner 2003–2012: la audacia y el cálculo. Buenos Aires:

Sudamericana.
Sosa, Cecilia. 2014. ‘Viral Affiliations: Facebook, Queer Kinship, and the
Memory of the Disappeared in Contemporary Argentina’. In Silence, Screen
and Spectacle, ed. Lindsey A. Freeman, Benjamin Nienass and Rachel Daniell,
77–94. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Index
A Badiou, Alain, 67
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, 6, 81, 91, 128 Barthes, Roland, 197, 198
Aguilar, Gonzalo, 23, 143, 150, 163 Batchen, Geoffrey, 188, 233
Alcoba, Laura, 101, 133 Benegas, David, 9, 97
Allegory, 38, 75 Bernard, Stiegler, 154, 171
Amado, Ana, 8, 15, 18, 34 Bernini, Emilio, 90, 103
Andermann, Jens, 183 Bettini, Gabriela, 2, 24, 69, 185, 187,
Archive, 126, 183, 185 198, 200, 247
and the repertoire, 185, 231, 234 Biodrama, 214
fever, 200, 221, 234 Blejmar, Jordana, 11, 14, 107, 110,
Arfuch, Leonor, 189, 210 125, 183, 188, 209, 226, 227
Arias, Lola, 14, 24, 185, 206, 213, 217 Blog theory, 105, 108
Arqueología de la ausencia, 187, 192 Boyle, Claire, 40, 41
Assman, Aleida, 49, 50, 58, 72 Bruzzone, Félix, 14, 19–22, 83,
AusenciasSee Gustavo Germano 85–88, 91, 98, 99, 101–103
Auslander, Phillip, 225, 228, 229, 232 Budassi, Sonia, 84, 86, 89
Autofiction, 39, 40, 107 Bystrom, Kerry, 92, 188
Avelar, Idelber, 125
Ávila, Benjamín, 14, 22, 134–136,
138, 141, 143, 148, 156, 177, C
203, 246, 247 Calveiro, Pilar, 48, 104, 119
Camera LucidaSee Roland Barthes
Carlotta, Estela de, 6
B Carri, Albertina, 19, 20, 22, 23, 85,
Badaró, Máximo, 9, 10. See also 101, 110, 183, 204, 245, 246
Victimhood of military Castañeda, Claudia, 176, 177
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 253

Memory Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51605-9
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
254 Index
Casullo, Nicolás, 58, 66, 77, 217 El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo
Cespedes, Marcelo, 8, 89, 93 en la lluviaSee Patricio Pron
Childhood, 21, 23, 33, 34, 55, 75 El premioSee Paula Markovitch
and cinema, 152, 153, 156, 165 Escrache, 9, 27, 92, 93, 95–97
and dictatorship, 21, 24, 33, 45, Escuela Mecánica de la Armada
151, 165 (ESMA), 7, 26, 82, 84, 86, 87,
and memory transfer, 49, 51, 66 100, 118, 121, 124, 125, 129, 241
and photography, 41, 154, 170,
184, 209, 215
and play, 185 F
and theatre, 184 Facebook, 6, 114, 248
Cinematic consciousness, 154, 155. Facundo, 52
See also Bernard Stiegler Feierstein, Daniel, 3, 77
Collage, 43, 187, 202, 204, 206, 223 Feld, Claudia, 28
Collective memory, 150, 154, 163, Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina, 6,
170, 189 10, 26, 81, 118
Comic book, 151, 153 FiliaciónSee Lucila Quieto
Crenzel, Emilio, 4, 26, 141 Ford Falcon, 76, 90, 96, 139, 151
Formas de volver a casaSee Alejandro
Zambra
D Fotos tuyasSee Inés Ulanovsky
De Grandis, Rita, 135, 172, 247 Friedländer, Saul, 14, 59
Dema, Pablo Darío, 85, 89 Friera, Silvina, 41, 43, 52, 70, 128, 204
Depetris Chauvin, Irene, 165
Derrida, Jacques, 200, 201, 213, 221,
223, 225, 229, 231, 232, 234. G
See also archive fever García, Luis Ignacio, 1, 114, 186,
Diario de una Princesa Montonera 195, 197
110% VerdadSee Mariana Eva Perez Garibotto, Verónica, 10, 13, 166, 176
Documentary techniques, 224 Gatti, Gabriel, 2, 49, 82, 83, 117,
of cinema, 19 118, 123, 127
of theatre, 218, 228 Gaunt, Robert, 208, 209
Domestic space, 162, 163, 177 Generation of Postmemory, TheSee
Doubrovsky, Serge, 39 Marianne Hirsch
Draper, Susana, 129 Genette, Gérard, 40, 41
Drucaroff, Elsa, 16 Germano, Gustavo, 187, 209, 210
Druliolle, Vincent, 4, 9, 26, 88 Guevara, Che, 143, 151, 178
E H
Edwards, Elizabeth, 185, 187, 191, Halbwachs, Maurice, 53
193, 200, 205, 207, 212, 213 Hart, Janice, 185, 187, 205, 207
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Index 255
HIJOS, 3, 5, 7, 9, 18, 20, 22, 25, 41, Laub, Dori, 60, 62

65, 71, 81–83, 87–89, 91–95 Lebeau, Vicky, 152
el alma en dos, 8, 89, 93 Ley de Obediencia debida, 82
Hirsch, Marianne, 3, 11, 15, 17, 19, Ley de Punto final, 82
35, 45, 63, 74, 138, 168, 171, Longoni, Ana, 192, 196, 199, 201
184, 202, 207, 210, 226, 233 López, Julio, 118
Historia oficial, La, 26, 165, 179 Lury, Karen, 134, 136, 148, 151
Humour, 34, 84, 94, 100, 126, 127, 244
Hutcheon, Linda, 83, 116
Huyssen, Andreas, 4, 12, 55, 65, 67, 243 M
Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 128
Maier, C.S., 12
I Malin, Andrea, 92
Identification, 11, 50, 51, 66, 105, Markovitch, Paula, 14, 23
158, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, Martin, Carol, 215, 216, 218
208, 215, 229 Materiality, 184–186, 190, 192, 195,
cinematic, 171 197, 200, 201, 203, 207, 209,
postmemorial, 11 212, 232
Indexicality, 186, 187, 200, 201, 204, and photography, 190
206, 212, 218, 233 and theatre, 184
Infancia clandestinaSee Benjamín Ávila and the archive, 184, 186, 222,
225
MausSee Art Spiegelman
J Memory; of HolocaustSee Childhood
Jelin, Elizabeth, 4, 61, 62, 126 and memory transfer/Postmemory/
Jenkins, Henry, 133, 161 Prosthetic memor transfer
Menem, Carlos, 84, 162
Militancy, 19, 20, 22, 23, 35, 44–46,
K 48, 49, 52, 61, 68, 69, 72, 73,
Kaiser, Susana, 3, 27, 92, 121, 129 75, 77, 85, 88, 91, 93, 95,
KamchatkaSee Marcelo Pineyro 101, 102, 114, 124, 133–137,
Kaufman, Susana, 4 139–141, 175, 212
Kilbourn, Russell, 153 and domestic sphere, 135, 136, 140,
Kirchner, Néstor, 5–7, 10, 69, 81, 141, 158, 160, 165, 169, 172,
113, 117, 241 234
Kohan, Martín, 20 MontoneroSee Montonero
Kuhn, Annette, 145, 157 Miller, Daniel, 218
Mi vida despuésSee Lola Arias
Modernity, 56, 153
L Montoneros, 70, 146, 178
LaCapra, Dominick, 56, 67 Moreira, Alejandra, 7, 244, 246, 249
Landsberg, Alison, 171, 172 Morris, Leslie, 73, 76
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
256 Index
Mourning, 11, 13, 23, 24, 83, 88, 92, Private sphere vs public sphere, 88,
113, 125, 127, 142, 143, 184, 108, 109, 151, 158, 232, 248
185, 191, 194, 209, 228, 248 Prividera, Nicolás, 67, 82, 89, 177,
politics of, 4, 66, 91, 95, 96, 104, 179, 224
134, 175, 203 Pron, Patricio, 21, 35, 49, 51, 55, 56,
Multidirectional memorySee Michael 59–65, 67–70, 73–75
Rothberg Prosthetic Memory, 171
N Q
Nouzeilles, Gabriela, 19, 93, 183 Quieto, Lucila, 24, 185, 187, 191,
Nunca más, 1, 26, 27, 69, 119, 141, 192, 194–198, 201–204, 206,
200, 248 208, 209, 218, 232, 247
O R
Olin, Margaret, 190, 195 Radstone, Susannah, 12, 27, 56, 66, 170
Rancière, Jacques, 197, 198, 203, 235
Recuerdos inventadosSee Gabriela
P Bettini
Page, Joanna, 20, 183 Reflexivity, 1, 15, 197, 247
Parody, 82, 83, 85, 90, 98, 106 Regueiro, Sabana, 26
Percepticide, 27, 121 Respiración artificialSee Ricardo Piglia
Perez, Mariana Eva, 12–14, 21, 22, Richard, Nelly, 58, 61, 62, 69, 185, 212
27, 83, 84, 105–111, 113, 114, Ricœur, Paul, 34
116–119, 122–129, 202, 228, Robin, Régine, 12
230, 245 Rojinsky, David, 186, 190, 209, 212,
Performance, 24, 92, 93, 104, 213
153, 183–185, 199, 201, 206, Roqué, María Inés, 78, 165, 177
208, 215–217, 219, 223–225, Ros, Ana, 3, 142
228–231, 233, 234 Rothberg, Michael, 65
Perón, Evita, 128 Rubios, Los, 19–23, 28, 77, 86, 110,
Perpetrator, 26, 52, 67, 119. See also 165, 175, 179, 183, 184, 204, 245
Victimhood of military
Piglia, Ricardo, 52
Piñeyro, Marcelo, 134, 138, 160 S
Pinney, Christopher, 190, 194 Salvi, Valentina, 9
PlaySee Childhood and play Sarlo, Beatriz, 16, 17, 20, 45, 47, 85,
Portela, Edurne M, 84, 97, 99 89, 174, 241, 244
PostmemorySee Childhood and memory Semán, Ernesto, 21, 35–43, 46, 47,
transfer/James E. Young/Mariane 51–53, 56, 59, 74–76, 102, 194,
Hirsch/Postmemorial Identification 204
gwm23@cam.ac.uk
Index 257
Silverman, Kaja, 179 U

Smith, Paul Julian, 160 Ulanovsky, Inés, 24, 185–187, 190,
Sontag, Susan, 45 195, 232, 235, 247
Sosa, Cecilia, 3, 11, 66, 85, 93, 94,
100, 102, 142, 163, 226, 228,
229, 248 V
Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva Van Alphen, Ernst, 17
ChinaSee Ernesto Semán Vezzetti, Hugo, 45, 47, 66, 77, 95,
Spiegelman, Art, 39, 41, 138, 202 119, 137
Stiegler, Bernard, 154, 155, 171, Victimhood, 3, 9, 10, 19, 22, 23, 25,
179 35, 52, 56, 67, 86, 91, 94, 104,
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 12, 14 125, 159, 164, 170–172, 174–
Symbolisation, 148, 203, 204, 207 177, 187, 191, 199, 213, 247, 248
of children, 133, 135, 167, 170, 177
of military, 9
T politicization of, 23, 126, 127, 134,
Tactility, 188, 197 161
Tal, Tzvi, 138, 168 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 5, 7, 26, 27, 67, 121
Taylor, Diana, 9, 77, 92, 120, 121, Voyeurism, 174, 175, 226
184, 185, 201, 202, 206, 234
Technics and TimeSee Bernard Stiegler
Tellas, Vivi, 214, 215 W
Topos, LosSee Félix Bruzzone Werth, Brenda, 3, 221, 247
Trauma, 3, 9–11, 13–15, 19, 23, 25, Wilson, Emma, 167, 169, 170
35, 45, 59, 65–68, 76, 81, 85,
117, 142, 153, 155, 157, 163,
166, 170, 228, 243, 247 Y
generational, 3, 10, 12, 14, 15, 22, Young, James E, 16, 44, 55, 66, 82,
23, 52, 54, 61, 66, 69, 74, 84, 201, 202
142, 163, 166, 177
politicization of, 9, 175
Tuñón, Julia, 138, 178 Z
Twitter, 6, 248 Zambra, Alejandro, 33–35
gwm23@cam.ac.uk

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The Politics of Postmemory

Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture

palgrave macmillan memory studies

More information about this series at

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939111

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © Juliet Ferguson/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

introduced me to Argentina, and to Catherine Barbour, who has been a

1 Introduction: The Second Generation in Contemporary

2 The Copyright Generation: Historical Memory and the

3 ‘HIJOS de una misma historia’: Identity Politics

3.3 Part Two: A Disneyland of Human Rights:

4 Hijos guerrilleros: Childhood Militancy

5 Performing Loss: Materiality and the Repertoire

6 Conclusion: The Politics of Postmemory 241

Fig. 1.1 ‘Conversación con Antonio’, Recuerdos inventados,

Introduction: The Second Generation

The opening image (Fig. 1.1) from Gabriela Bettini’s photo-essay

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Fig. 1.1 ‘Conversación con Antonio’, Recuerdos inventados, Gabriela Bettini

in original). Furthermore, in a discussion of generational agency in the

elaboration of cultural memory, and have effectively served to define

[I]n the current socio-cultural Argentine context […], it is impossible

It is within this new dynamic and contested arena of cultural memory,

1.1 The Return of Politics

regime’s centros clandestinos,5 the momentous and highly publicised

afforded to these organisations as part of the Kirchnerist impetus towards

While, as Ana Amado asserts in her seminal study of Argentine cinema,

As the second generation reached an age at which the events of the

Badaró likewise contends, in reference to a speech given in 2000 by

Postmemorial work […] strives to reactivate and reembody more distant

The Politics of Postmemory engages principally with these horizon-

familial transmission’ (35), The Politics of Postmemory claims that—in the

1.2 The Postmemory Generation

post-Holocaust theories of psychoanalysis and trauma (Felman and

[T]oo much of contemporary memory discourse focuses on the personal

More specifically, in the Argentine context, Garibotto contends that

victimhood, this study instead demonstrates that, by moving away from a

understands this affiliative ‘cluster of experience’ in terms of a shared

Sus poéticas testimoniales son episódicas, fragmentarias, a menudo vueltas

[Their poetic testimonies are episodic, fragmented, and at times self-reflex-

In a similar manner, the Argentine writer and critic Elsa Drucaroff

aspect of all forms of memory, not just postmemory, Sarlo criticises

The normal trajectory of memory is fundamentally indexical. Memories,

Though Sarlo rightly contends that ‘lo vicario no es específico de la

Postmemory that ‘[p]ostmemory is not identical to memory: it is “post”;

legacies. In this way, The Politics of Postmemory broadens Hirsch’s defini-

1.3 Los rubios and the Structure of the Book

to know them, that no reconstruction is possible. They are out of our

transformations under the Kirchner era, bringing into question recent

(2011) and Paula Markovitch’s El premio (2011). Both films recon-

generation contest the governmentally endorsed, media-driven and often

(out of a motivation to get together, to vindicate the fight of our fathers,

and knew nothing of the issue of the disappeared in particular’ (2012:

la memoria (2006); Cecilia Vallina (ed.), Crítica del testimonio (2009);

Bruzzone, Félix. 2008. ‘Los topos’. Cuentomilibro.com. http://www.cuentomili-

LaCapra, Dominick. 1994. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma.

Ros, Ana. 2012. The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and

The Copyright Generation: Historical

In Formas de volver a casa, a novel by the Chilean author Alejandro

1 Introduction: The Second Generation in Contemporary

2 The Copyright Generation: Historical Memory and the

3.3 Part Two: A Disneyland of Human Rights:

5 Performing Loss: Materiality and the Repertoire

6 Conclusion: The Politics of Postmemory 241

Fig. 1.1 ‘Conversación con Antonio’, Recuerdos inventados,

The opening image (Fig. 1.1) from Gabriela Bettini’s photo-essay

Fig. 1.1 ‘Conversación con Antonio’, Recuerdos inventados, Gabriela Bettini

1.1 The Return of Politics

1.3 Los rubios and the Structure of the Book

2.1 Part One: Soy un bravo piloto and the Limits

2.2.2 Generational Transfer and Postmemory

2.2.4 Political Agency, Postmemory and Pron