Placing Latin American memory: Sites and the politics of mourning

Abstract

This introduction sketches out some spatial and locational aspects of memory and mourning in postdictatorial Latin America. The special issue aims to shed light on memorial sites’ role in the process of reclaiming individual and collective stories from victims of dictatorial repression. If, as Susana Draper has argued, during Latin America’s “return to democracy,” an “architectonics of transition” inscribed in urban spaces new diagrams of citizenship and exclusion predicated on the timeless present of consumption, memory’s “architectures of affect” commemorating victims of past state terror represent both an interruption and a challenge to neoliberalism’s postdictatorial city. Beyond the limits of the urban, rural landscape and the marking of diasporic locations of exile overseas also speak to the dispersive and uprooting effects of violence. The collection also asks for the frictions emerging between global forms of commemoration and local constellations of historical experience as manifest in particular sites.