Accounting for Violence

Marketing Memory in Latin America

Leigh A. Payne, Ksenija Bilbija, Leigh A. Payne, Ksenija Bilbija

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780822394327
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Accounting for Violence offers bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences provide in-depth analyses of the political economy of memory in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors take up issues of authenticity and commodification, as well as the "never again" imperative implicit in memory goods and memorial sites. They describe how bookstores, cinemas, theaters, the music industry, and television shows (and their commercial sponsors) trade in testimonial and fictional accounts of the authoritarian past; how tourist itineraries have come to include trauma sites and memorial museums; and how memory studies has emerged as a distinct academic field profiting from its own journals, conferences, book series, and courses. The memory market, described in terms of goods, sites, producers, marketers, consumers, and patrons, presents a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, commodifying memory potentially cheapens it. On the other hand, too little public exposure may limit awareness of past human-rights atrocities; such awareness may help to prevent their recurring.

Contributors. Rebecca J. Atencio, Ksenija Bilbija, Jo-Marie Burt, Laurie Beth Clark, Cath Collins, Susana Draper, Nancy Gates-Madsen, Susana Kaiser, Cynthia E. Milton, Alice A. Nelson, Carmen Oquendo Villar, Leigh A. Payne, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, Maria Eugenia Ulfe

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword: On Memory and Memorials
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Time is Money: The Memory Market in Latin America
• A Prime Time to Remember: Memory Merchandising in Globo’s Anos Rebeldes
• Accounting for Murder: The Contested Narratives of the Life and Death of María Elena Moyano
• Trauma Tourism in Latin America
• The Business of Memory: Reconstructing Torture Centers as Shopping Malls and Tourist Sites
• Marketing and Sacred Space: The Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires
• Reading ’68: The Tlatelolco Memorial and Gentrification in Mexico City
• Promoting Peru: Tourism and Post-Conflict Memory
• The Moral Economy of Memory: Public and Private Commemorative Space in Post-Pinochet Chile
• Dress for Success: Fashion, Memory, and Media Representation of Augusto Pinochet
• Tortured by Fashion: Making Memory through Corporate Advertising
• Memory Inventory: The Production and Consumption of Memory Goods in Argentina
• Conclusion. Marketing Discontent: The Political Economy of Memory in Latin America
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index