This panel examines how contemporary literature uses horror as a transgenerational and transcultural approach to memory. We explore how aesthetic strategies derived from horror narratives confront legacies of colonization, dictatorship, and totalitarianism and how these strategies mediate experiences of trauma, often transmitted across generations. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the way in which these narratives expose the instability of political systems in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
We argue that horror reflects trauma while also actively developing practices of remembrance. By challenging linear narratives and rejecting realist modes, these narratives present alternative forms of cultural memory that address authoritarian pasts and uncertain current situations. Our contributions will analyze how horror and its aesthetics are used on multiple levels to explore themes such as violence, fear, dark humor and absence, as well as to destabilize the boundaries between conventional literary genres. Particular attention is given to the role of form and senses in shaping collective memory. For instance, we examine the use of auditive motifs and visual structures that create an unsettling imagery.
We propose that horror functions not only as an aesthetic category, but also as a political and mnemonic tool. It provides strategies for resisting erasure and for addressing unstable democracies, offering a vision of an uncertain future. Moving beyond national or regional perspectives on horror narratives, we emphasize the importance of adopting transregional lenses. Examining Latin American and Eastern European literary works can provide insight into common challenges and concerns, such as the transitional processes, migration and unstable political systems.
Anne Brüske, University of Regensburg, "Apuntes para un viaje a Alemania (Aguilera/Menéndez 2016): Double memory of diaspora and totalitarianism translated through horror and gore".
The autographic narrative Apuntes para un viaje a Alemania (2016) looks with horror, not nostalgia at the freshly exiled narrator’s past in Cuba. Indeed, the autobiographical discourse compares the lived experience of Cuban and East German state socialism and contextualizes it within the wider framework of 20th century totalitarianism.
Through its double discourse—both verbal and graphic— the comic connects different layers of memory. The verbal discourse of the autobiographical narrator recounts Aguilera’s memories of arriving in Germany as a Cuban exile and stranger to German everyday culture, his personal memories being also a pretext for positioning himself as an author in a rich web of intertexts. Through a mélange of horror and humor it furthermore presents a reflection on the analogue collective and cultural memory of (post)socialist populations that engender similar trans-socialist identities both in Cuba and in Eastern European societies. The graphic discourse by Aldito Menéndez accompanies Aguilera’s verbal discourse while also developing a narrative of its own, by assembling black and white photographs emblematic of the collective visual memory of the human catastrophes of the 20th century. These photographs, blended with Cuban motives, sport the exterior of Auschwitz concentration camp, totalitarian political leaders, scenes from 1920s silent movies and Leni Riefenthal’s fascist photographs.
Going beyond individual and artistic autobiographies, the combination of visual and verbal strand creates a deeper reflection on horror instilled by totalitarian political regimes. By its aesthetics of horror and humor, the comic seeks to push the boundaries of literary and ethical conventions to express the inexpressible and to do memory of postsocialism in its own peculiar way.
Bárbara Aranda, University of Regensburg, "Haunted by Violence: Transcultural Horror and Memory Work in Mónica Ojeda’s Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol".
Memory in Latin America is linked to violence, especially the everyday violence that leads to feelings of fear, displacement and uncertainty about the future. In Monica Ojeda’s work, memory is shaped by the narco-violence of contemporary Ecuador, the shadows of colonial and postcolonial domination, and the haunting presence of both real and fantastic forces. Her characters are drawn into a world of hallucinations where ritual, mysticism, horror and the weird converge, revealing how memory can manifest in spaces where trauma cannot be narrated conventionally.
This paper contributes to the panel by raising and connecting the following questions: How does Ojeda portray horror as a way of addressing unstable democratic realities? How does the hybrid aesthetic of gótico andino, combined with the weird at the intersection of science fiction and horror, constitute a memory practice? Can the idea of a transculturation of weird and gothic traditions be conceptualized when incorporating Latin American sociopolitical elements into their traditional topics?
As part of its analysis, the paper draws on theories of cultural memory (Assman 2011) and transcultural memory (Erll 2011), as well as concepts such as gótico andino (Ojeda 2020) and the weird (Fisher 2016; Sanchiz 2022) in a close reading of the novel Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol (2024). Ultimately, the paper shows how Ojeda locates horror and the weird as mnemonic strategies to reveal systemic violence, destabilize traditional narratives and imagine alternative practices of remembrance that are necessary for sustaining democracy.
Svitlana Pidoprygora, University of Innsbruck, "Eastern Europe as Horror: Ukraine’s History Between Global Imagination and National Self-Representation in Graphic Narratives".
This paper explores how Ukraine is represented through the aesthetics of horror in both global and national graphic narratives. International works often portray Ukraine as a space of perpetual catastrophe, drawing on historical events that have made the country visible on the global cultural and political map – such as the Famine of 1932–1933, the Chernobyl disaster (1986), and the ongoing war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine (2014–present). Ukrainian authors also engage with the aesthetics of horror but transform it from within, turning it into a language of resistance, testimony, and cultural survival.
Comparing global works such as Igort’s comic reportages Quaderni Ucraini (Ukrainian Notebooks, 2011, 2022) with Ukrainian publications including Mykola Babak’s art book Vil’kova Krov (Willow Blood, 1998) and Korotka istoriia dovhoi viiny (A Brief History of a Long War, 2025) by Mariam Naiem, Yurii Vus, and Ivan Kypybida, the paper analyzes the authors’ strategies and artistic decisions in representing Ukraine through the aesthetics of horror. It seeks to understand how these contrasting perspectives emerge and how local memories are reinterpreted by non-Ukrainian authors according to their own worldviews and historical perspectives, circulating within transnational memory spaces and reflecting contemporary social moods and political agendas. Special attention is given to visual identity and cover design strategies in translated editions of these graphic narratives, which vividly demonstrate how the aesthetics of horror intersect with global mass-cultural imagery.
20260730T140020260730T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires6.12. Aesthetics of Horror in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Remembering Dysfunctional Politics, Imagining Uncertain FuturesSV205MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
Memory and Authoritarianism: Graphic Testimony and Resistance in Malik Sajad's Graphic Novel, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir
Individual paperArt, Literature, Film, Media, and Other Representations00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC
This paper aims at exploring the intersections of memory, history and democracy by focusing on the mythological-political history of Kashmir and the lived realities of its inhabitants who experience recurring cycles of violence. Through critical textual analysis, this paper primarily explores Malik Sajad's debut graphic novel, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) as a form of testimonial literature to complicate the idea of national memory and foreground how the narrative of authoritarian government attempts to dominate the narrative written by Sajad, aka Munnu. This paper attempts to analyze how official history and mainstream media reports frequently overlook the abstract public memories within the conflict zone. The lives of individuals such as Munnu, his family, neighbours and his friends, who navigate domestic routines, education, romance, and heartbreak amid curfews, and widespread surveillance enforced by occupying Indian forces, tell the story of Kashmir, and these events culminate in massacres, which are then subsequently reflected in Sajad's artwork. In the novel, the arrangement of the borderless panels and ragged speech balloons are reflective of cultural frames for the events and stories in the book and Kashmir itself. The paper foregrounds how the artist-historian reclaims and rewrites Kashmiri history amidst the violent atrocities of the Indian military. Drawing on Pierre Nora's idea of "lieux de memoire" and Spivak's notion of "epistemic violence", this work analyzes the unsettled milieu of Kashmir, exploring how Sajad's artwork constantly undermines the authoritarian credibility and truth claims by blending its text, images and structure. Ultimately, by highlighting personal testimonies and collective recollections of trauma, this paper reconceptualizes memory as an active practice of documenting present-time lived experience of oppression.
