Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling
Listening to Silences in Postdictatorship Argentina
- 240 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling
Listening to Silences in Postdictatorship Argentina
About This Book
Argentina's repressive 1976â83 dictatorship, during which an estimated thirty thousand people were "disappeared, " prompted the postauthoritarian administrations and human rights groups to encourage public exposure of past crimes and traumas. Truth commissions, trials, and other efforts have aimed to break the silence and give voice to the voiceless. Yet despite these many reckonings, there are still silences, taboos, and unanswerable questions.
Nancy J. Gates-Madsen reads between the lines of Argentine cultural texts (fiction, drama, testimonial narrative, telenovela, documentary film) to explore the fundamental role of silenceâthe unsaidâin the expression of trauma. Her careful examination of the interplay between textual and contextual silences illuminates public debate about the meaning of memory in Argentinaâwhich stories are being toldand, more important, which are being silenced. The imposition of silence is not limited to the military domain or its apologists, she shows; the human rights community also perpetuates and creates taboos.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Listening to Silences
- 1. Tortured Silence and Silenced Torture in Eduardo Pavlovskyâs Paso de dos
- 2. Filling in the Space of Disappearance: Eric Stener Carlsonâs I Remember Julia: Voices of the Disappeared
- 3. âThe Shape Described by Their Absenceâ: Disappearance in Juan JosĂ© Saerâs La pesquisa
- 4. Silencing the Politics of Identity: From Elsa Osorioâs A veinte años, Luz to Telefeâs Montecristo
- 5. The Memory of Forgetting in Luisa Valenzuelaâs La travesĂa
- 6. Fallout of the Memory âBoomâ: Seeing and Not-Seeing the Ex-ESMA in Jonathan Perelâs El predio
- Conclusion: Always Approaching, Never Arriving
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index