This panel aims to reflect on the construction of official memory in Argentina and Peru regarding the political violence that unfolded during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a memory that often excludes a wide range of actors and experiences. The papers presented explore diverse forms of representation that highlight contested narratives and the lack of self-critical perspectives from both state and guerrilla positions, which tend to uphold static or frozen portrayals of past events.
In contrast to these obstructed narratives, the panel traces the emergence of other subjectivities, women, children, Indigenous peoples, who demand a critical revision of dominant memory frameworks that marginalize alternative viewpoints and reflections. The analyses focus on disruptive discourses that challenge the hegemonic imaginary, incorporating new voices, perspectives, and forms of expression that convey the dramatic and complex lived experiences of violence.
By foregrounding these alternative forms of agency and expression, including the entry of otherness, a shift toward subjectivity, and the self-critique of leftist militants, the panel proposes a re-mapping of memory. This new mapping allows for the reconsideration of historical narratives in more open, inclusive terms, rejecting all forms of occlusion and advocating for a plural, dynamic understanding of the past.
Isabel Quintana, Universidad de Buenos Aires / CONICET, Debates on Violence (Argentine 1960- 1970)
This paper aims exploring different debates on the topic of violence during the 60 and 70 decades in Argentine as an event that disrupts national historical becoming. This topic is inscribed within the broader debate that was elaborated in other disciplines, such as History, Marxist Philosophy and Cultural Criticism, with the goal of reconsidering the notions of subjectivity, violence and revolution in the context of different moments of social and institutional crisis. From this perspective, the problem of political violence and ideological obliteration has become the fundamental subject matter for our studies.
Rocío Ferreira, DePaul University, Women Combatants, Resistance, and Female Agency in Post-Conflict Peruvian Literary and Visual Culture
This presentation examines how contemporary Peruvian literature and visual media produced by women articulate narratives of resistance and female agency in the aftermath of the internal armed conflict (1980–2000). More than two decades after the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report (2003), Peru remains deeply affected by state violence, racism, classism, misogyny, and unresolved social fractures. Cultural production continues to play a vital role in addressing these legacies, seeking to reconstruct a collective memory that includes the silenced experiences of marginalized individuals and communities.
Through the analysis of selected texts and films created by Peruvian women writers and filmmakers, this study explores how post-conflict cultural narratives confront and deconstruct patriarchal, racist, and classist power structures. In particular, it focuses on representations of women combatants, figures who have often been stereotyped or erased from official histories. These works challenge dominant narratives by foregrounding the racial, ethnic, and linguistic heterogeneity of female subjects and by questioning their exclusion from the imagined national identity.
By highlighting the political and aesthetic strategies employed to reclaim voice, agency, and memory, this paper argues that these cultural artifacts not only resist hegemonic discourses but also propose alternative frameworks for understanding the conflict and its aftermath. Ultimately, they contribute to a broader rethinking of gender, identity, and citizenship in contemporary Peru.
Silvana López, ILH UBA, Writing the books of the war, Rodolfo Fogwill, an incitement
As an aesthetic conception, the Argentine post dictatorship is characterized by an overabundance of discourses and by the questioning of defeat or victory, whether personal or external, but not necessarily by a philosophical political analysis of these tensions, certainly a problematic assertion, comprising a set of buts and standpoints that either add to or subtract from the ongoing debate on a matter that remains unavoidable. Beatriz Sarlo, in Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión, strongly critiques the “subjective turn” she identifies in texts and other media, such as cinema, about that past, warning of the risks of losing sight of the historicity and political force of that lived time. Pilar Calveiro, in contrast, argues that relegating testimony to another archival source would be ignoring the denunciatory and resistant power of these voices. In this vein, Rodolfo Fogwill, through a strongly corrosive operation, redirects the focus of violence from the bodies of those who testify and from the bodies of the disappeared in order to expose another form of violence: the military dictatorship was not “civic military,” but rather an operation of a “banker, oligarchic, and multinational character,” whose victory was masked by the violation of human rights. This meta position as a writer can be observed not only in his works Los libros de la guerra and Estados alterados, but also in his novels, in situations and characters, such as En otro orden de cosas and Vivir afuera. I examine how constructions of violence and memory, under the sieve of Fogwill’s perspective, as a subterranean cipher of the “pichicera” and therefore, the failure/victory of the Falklands/Malvinas War, still resonate and fragment in Argentina, five decades after the military coup.
Gloria Macedo-Janto, University of Oregon, Absent Voices Construct Memory in Chungui: horror sin Lágrimas
The Internal Armed Conflict (CAI) in Peru raged from 1980 to 2000. Acts of violence gripped the entire population, particularly those living in the Andean and Amazonian regions. Chungui: Horror sin lágrimas. Una historia peruana (2010) is a documentary about the town of the same name in the Ayacucho region of the Peruvian highlands. Based on the book Retazos de memoria (2005) by Edilberto Jiménez, the documentary was directed by Luis Felipe Degregori. During the CAI, entire towns were left without children or young people, with only adult women and the elderly sometimes surviving. Chungui recounts the murder of children by the PCP-SL. The memory of the adults and other survivors compensates for their absence; these are the pseudo-witnesses that Agamben speaks of. The ghosts that haunt the narrative are the dead children and people with truncated futures, as well as the latent possibility of war. There is also the abandonment by the State and the institutionalized contempt for the people of the Andes. This paper questions the concept of 'nostalgia' in the construction of memory, as references to testimonial memories of torture and pain are still used to describe Chungui. Unlike other cinematic accounts that depict memory in fragments through the eyes of children who witnessed pivotal moments of political crises, this documentary shows that the persistence of memory can be explained by absence, from death, even when it is hidden and attempts are made to erase its traces. In other words, memory is not necessarily the opposite of forgetting; rather, it is the absence of it.
20260731T173020260731T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires11.15. New Maps of Memory and Institutional and Guerrilla ViolenceSV402 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
