3.15. Arts and Memories of Dictatorship [ES/EN]

Nona Fernández's novels stand out for their mnemonic intention. La dimensión desconocida, The Twilight Zone, from 2016 is one that joins both fact and fiction in order to present a sort of impossible scenario: when the torturer confesses his crimes. In general, Fernández's works refer back to the Pinochet regime and some of the darkest moments of Chilean history since its independence in the early 19th century. However, this 2016 work stands out in its exploration of institutionalized horror, state violence and the search for truth and justice. Through the character of Andrés Valenzuela, a secret police agent, Fernández's text kickstarts a survey of Chilean memory processes that highlights the complexity of these, as they coexist between fragmentation, erasure, negation, or silencing, demonstrating that remembering the dictatorship is still a contested territory in Chilean society. The realm of fiction, together with elements of testimony and factual documentation provide fertile ground for a discussion surrounding the role of literature as an art form that contributes to society to resist forgetting and paves the way to (re)constructing national memory. The novel will be studied in through its narrative mechanisms, its use of documents and testimonies, the role of fiction to imagine impossible yet necessary scenarios of reconciliation, and how the quotidian may become uncanny under a certain light. In theoretical terms, the study will consider Marina Franco's conceptualization of 'recent history', Elizabeth Jelin's book "La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social" (2017), Nelly Richard's studies of Chilean trauma in cultural expression, Idelver Avelar's "Alegorías de la derrota" (2000), Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny" and Tzvetan Todorov's notions of The Fantastic.

The Chilean civil–military dictatorship (1973–1990) carried out enforced disappearances and controlled the news media to conceal and distort human-rights violations. Beginning in 1976, however, counter-hegemonic newsmagazine (Hoy, Análisis, Boletín Solidaridad) circulated and challenged the official discourse. The press functioned simultaneously as an agent and a product of collective memory, sustaining and expanding public understandings of human-rights experiences in Chile. The year 1978, marked by the Amnesty Law, the regime’s institutional consolidation, protests by relatives’ associations, and international sanctions, was a moment defined by conflicting memory knots and competing interpretive frames concerning enforced disappearance. In authoritarian contexts, counter-discursive strategies re-signify and reassemble fragments of discourse to open new interpretive horizons and new ways of naming and narrating the world. This study characterizes such counter-discursive strategies by analyzing journalistic role performance and enunciative positioning in textual segments on enforced disappearance in opposition magazines. The corpus comprises 430 thematic segments published in 1978. The findings identify strategies that contest the regime of veridiction and the legitimacy of the state’s official human-rights discourse. Controversies coalesce around the existence of the detained-disappeared, the legitimacy of civil-society action, the role of state agents, and the normative standards of civic coexistence. Watchdog and civic roles predominate in Hoy and Análisis, positioning tends toward an attenuated denunciatory stance, whereas in Boletín Solidaridad appeals to a universal ethical norm and the amplification of suffering and affective states prevail. These strategies contribute to the configuration and representation of social memory of enforced disappearance under a Southern Cone dictatorship.

This paper departs from a critical consensus, as outlined by scholars such as Basile, Amaro, Blejmar, Peller, and others, that recognizes a substantial body of second-generation literary production across the Southern Cone. Emerging mainly in Argentina and Chile since the late twentieth century, this corpus reimagines the memory of dictatorship through narrative forms that confront inherited trauma, domestic silence, and the intergenerational transmission of history. In Brazil, however, this field remains less visible. Although the country shares with its neighbors a similar dictatorial past, linguistic distance and specific political trajectories have often kept its literature and criticism apart from the broader Latin American debate. The recent expansion of second-generation writing has been shaped by distinct yet complementary historical moments: first, the documentation and public debate initiated by the National Truth Commission; second, the climate of denialism and revisionism that intensified under President Bolsonaro’s government and reverberated throughout the region. Both contexts—truth-seeking and negation—have stimulated new literary responses to the question of how the past remains unresolved and continues to act upon the present. While literary criticism on second-generation narratives is well established in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, few studies incorporate Brazil into this regional conversation. Likewise, Brazilian criticism rarely engages with Hispanic-American theoretical frameworks. This paper proposes a dialogue across these contexts, exploring both their affinities and their differences. It examines how Brazilian novels and longer narratives intersect with Southern Cone traditions, particularly in how they construct childhood, memory, and inherited experience. Finally, it considers the category of space, defined through its relation to temporality, as key to understanding how second-generation fiction articulates displacement, belonging, and the uneven geography of post-dictatorial memory in the region.

In 2024, 40 years after hundreds of lives were lost in the Vila Socó fire, this tragedy was remembered and recognized through a theatrical performance. "Vila Socó" took to the streets, squares, and memorial of the victims to the neighborhood in the city of Cubatão (SP). The play, which has the same name as the neighborhood, tells the story of the fire that occurred on February 25, 1984, the penultimate year of the Brazilian corporate-military dictatorship. The fire, caused by the leakage of at least 700,000 liters of gasoline from a pipeline of the Brazilian state oil company, killed between 500 and 700 people, according to the São Paulo Public Prosecutor's Office (MPSP). During interviews with neighborhood residents, several aspects stood out: (1) the silence surrounding the fire; some daughters and granddaughters of survivors say that their family members avoid talking about the subject to this day; (2) the residents' identification with the main character in the show, Menino Bicho de Mangue; (3) the struggle for housing after the fire and the resulting police violence to control popular protests. In conversations with artists from Coletivo 302, it is clear that they are committed to presenting society with a version of events that counters the hegemonic discourse. Throughout the research, still in its initial stages, it has been found that the rights to memory, truth, and justice are a continuous process of struggle and vindication promoted by organized social groups and movements. Forty-one years after the fire destroyed much of Vila Socó, no one has been held accountable or punished. It is also possible to observe that artistic language plays an important role in the elaboration of psychosocial trauma, questioning the official narrative and in establishing a living connection of memory between generations.

Concurrently (as in other countries), Argentina and Brazil experienced part of the dictatorship period together. The post-dictatorship period was handled by these two countries differently, with one facing the process of judgment and plans for remembrance, while the other faced a murky climate. Given these circumstances, literature is present, presenting us with the different faces that emerged during this period. Based on this, we are focusing our doctoral thesis research on the works "O corpo interminável," published in 2019 by Brazilian author Claudia Lage, and "Aparecida," by Argentine author Marta Dillon, published in 2015. Through these works, we delve into the theory of comparative literature, developed by Brazilian theorist Tania Franco Carvalhal. Our objectives include understanding the importance of the memory of textile materials—that is, the aforementioned clothing of the politically disappeared that appears in the narratives—and how they contribute to the discussion on memory. Based on some of the results already obtained, we were able to map that the attachment to keeping clothing and textile materials is influenced by gender, as discussed by Michele Perrot (2024) and Peter Stallybrass (2023). Another debate surrounding one of the findings is how the country dealt with the post-dictatorship period, which is relatively linked to the unfolding of the narratives under investigation.