5.15. Embodied Memory: Performance, Violence, and Political Imagination [ES/EN]

This research examines the performatic interventions by Frente Cultural 24 de Marzo (FC24M) during the annual March 24th march commemorating Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983) in Buenos Aires. These interventions combine art and activism through theatre, dance, music, and visual elements, raising the question of how memorial narratives are produced and mobilized within artivist practices (Verzero, 2020). The study uses participatory action research and autoethnography framed by transfeminist and decolonial perspectives (Espinosa Miñoso, 2014). It applies a qualitative hermeneutic analysis that focuses on the complex relationship between memory and activism (Merrill & Rigney, 2024), emphasizing the tensions, contradictions, and pluralities inherent in grassroots mnemonic practices and narratives. This approach aligns with recent memory studies scholarship that challenges harmonizing narratives and instead embraces difference and contestation within collective memory (Antweiler, 2023) . The analysis highlights how FC24M’s performatic practices serve as forms of activist memory work—memories actively mobilized within ongoing struggles for social transformation. These ephemeral, embodied interventions dialogue and contest dominant official narratives related to dictatorship, colonial histories, and patriarchal violence, while fostering alternative visions and political possibilities. The interventions reveal how memory is not only about recalling the past but also about shaping activist repertoires and futures. By focusing on how diverse and sometimes contradictory narratives emerge in these grassroots performances, the study reflects a broader shift in memory studies toward acknowledging the plural and contested nature of memory activism. It contributes to understanding how memory practices resist epistemic violence embedded in dominant narratives and instead contribute to inclusive, transformative social movements centered on difference, tension, and pluriversality.

This research analyzes the performance ¿Qué limpian las que limpian? (What do the ones who clean, clean?) (2020) by Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva to examine how the body operates as a living archive of domestic labor and what forms of memory are activated when this labor is brought into public space. For one month, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mynerva and her mother—recently dismissed from her job as a domestic worker—performed the action of sweeping for eight hours daily on a vacant lot in Villa El Salvador, Lima. This repeated gesture of "dusting the dust" operates simultaneously as a metaphor for precarious domestic labor and as an act of resistance against its historical erasure. Drawing on Diana Taylor's concepts of repertoire and archive, I propose that this performance can be understood as a vital act of transfer where the memory of domestic labor is preserved and transmitted through the body in motion. The gesture of sweeping, inherited and reiterated by generations of women, transforms the body into a living archive that safeguards feminine and racialized knowledge excluded from official records. Building on Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, the work can be read as an exercise in intergenerational transmission, where the daughter embodies a memory she did not directly experience but inherits through affect and repetition. I argue that by bringing domestic labor—traditionally private and devalued—into public space, Mynerva transforms everyday life into a site of memory and a form of political action. The performance thus reactivates a memory of the present: that of feminized and racialized labor that sustains everyday life and that contemporary art can make visible, transforming the laboring body into a territory of political resistance and cultural preservation.

This paper examines the role of theater in democratization by exploring memories of state violence in South Korea, specifically through Han Kang’s novel Human Acts (2014). The novel centers around the Gwangju massacre, the pro-democracy uprising in May 1980, and the horrific state violence perpetrated by the military government. Particularly, the paper highlights one chapter in which a censored script about the massacre is still performed on stage, while the actors attempt to deliver the deleted lines in silence. Amid the terrifying presence of disguised state agents, the audience, initially confused, reads the actors’ twitching lips as they communicate the unspoken words. Through this scene, the author illustrates theater as a space where citizens can collectively recall the trauma of state violence, honor the sacrifices made, and renew their commitment to democratic values. The paper then discusses the sociopolitical trajectory of this novel that was blacklisted and labeled as ‘ideological’ by President Park Geun-Hye. The conservative Park regime attempted to downplay the significance of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea’s democratization process. The events surrounding her impeachment in 2016, following the mass Candlelight demonstrations, along with Han Kang’s Nobel Prize in 2024, illustrate the ongoing tensions regarding the memorialization of Gwangju and the resilience of democracy. Lastly, this paper examines the theatrical adaptations of Han Kang’s Human Acts, “Human Fugue” in Korea and “The Boy is Coming” in Poland to discuss the political significance of these performances across cultural boundaries. Drawing on the scholarship on theater and democracy, such as Elizabeth Son’s Embodied Reckonings (2018) and David Wiles’ Democracy, Theatre and Performance (2024), this paper explores how performance --whether on stages, pages, or streets-- helps rewrite historical narratives and build communities of shared memory through civic participation and affective force.

The question of how societies remember imperial legacy and violence and negotiate their lingering effects remains central to debates in postwar Japanese literary and cultural studies. While scholars have examined Okinawan writers’ exploration of marginality, trauma, and identity in relation to Japan’s colonial past and the ongoing U.S. military occupation, less attention has been paid to how Okinawan literature, amidst these two backdrops, confronts the symbolic persistence of the Japanese Emperor and the imperial system as sites of both reverence and repression. This paper analyzes how Okinawan author Medoruma Shun exposes and contests the emperor’s enduring ideological and affective power in postwar memory. Focusing on two short stories—“Walking Through a Street Called Peace” (1986) and “January 7” (1989)—I examine how Medoruma challenges collective memory and individuals’ identity in relation to the nation-state. The first story stages acts of defilement and tension during the 1983 imperial visit to Okinawa, while the second portrays the chaos and indifference surrounding Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989. Leading up to WWII, Japanese society was taught that the royal family was holy; the notion was so ingrained in people’s minds that the Allied Powers later requested Emperor Hirohito to officially proclaim his humanity and denounce his divinity. Through elements of the body—feces, blood, and sexuality—Medoruma transgresses the still extant boundary between the sacred and the profane, exposing the instability of imperial authority. I argue that Medoruma reconceives resistance not as heroic defiance but as embodied, ambivalent gestures from ordinary people that undermine the assumed moral and emotional foundations of post-war identity that is inseparable from the nation-state, represented by the once-sacred emperor. By unsettling identity and authority through bodily and affective transgression, these two stories demonstrate how literature challenges exclusionary narratives of national purity while cultivating resilience through irreverence and irony.

This paper examines the works of Egyptian writer Basma ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, focusing on how mechanisms of state power control and subjugate the populace by cultivating and exploiting emotions such as fear, anxiety, humiliation, and self-aggrandizement. It argues that these strategies sustain an atomized and distrustful society—one dehumanized and rendered politically inert, where collective action and moral agency are systemically undermined. Through a complementary reading of her novels aṭ-Ṭābūr (The Queue) and Hunā badan (Here Is a Body), the study explores both the totalitarian logic that governs these worlds and the fragile countercurrents that arise within them, gestures that hint at the formation of alternative social imaginaries. Drawing on the conceptual framework of slow memory, it traces how moments of empathy, mutual recognition, and shared remembrance create pockets of democracy within authoritarian contexts—transformative spaces in which the possibility of justice and human dignity quietly endures. By examining how vulnerable, marginalized, and disempowered individuals resist and rearticulate their identities within oppressive systems, the study suggests that democratization can take root even under conditions of profound coercion, as a gradual and relational process of restoring dignity and human connection.