1.19. Non-Human Visions and Fictional Landscapes

In the first sentence of his 2017 memoir Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, Salvadoran writer Roberto Lovato likens memory to a machete. The machete is versatile in its use: it is vital for maintaining crops and sustaining survival in many Salvadoran households; yet, it also doubles as a weapon. In Lovato’s writing, the machete becomes a metaphor for how historical, familial, and sociopolitical memory creates fragmentation and divisions the way a machete would. Lovato thereafter tasks his diasporic compatriots with a responsibility to conduct the “necessary work of unforgetting” on the path to collective healing and recovery. I interpret unforgetting as the process of uncovering truths while maintaining awareness for how such truths or memories have been “forgotten” through trauma, military-enforced silencing, and state-imposed disavowal of memory. Both El Salvador and the US have and continue to weaponize the ways Salvadorans interact with memory; as such, Salvadorans living in both El Salvador and the US must continually confront the complexities of (re)memory and counterhistories. Salvadoran literary self-representation is especially critical as global media continues to push dehumanizing, reductive stereotypes of Central Americans and as the US strengthens imperial ties with El Salvador’s current regime. My paper will thus examine the work of contemporary poets in the US and El Salvador alike to consider how they take on the “necessary work of unforgetting.” I argue that these literary renderings of unforgetting build a counter-historical archive and break through silences as a vital means of ensuring futurity for Salvadorans. I will show how contemporary Salvadoran poetry engenders a counter-historical archive from which future generations can draw upon and through which Salvadorans can access connection to each other, to place, and to collective memory.

This paper examines the mnemonic potential of counterfactual thinking and uchronia, understood as distinctive privileges of fiction (Nünning, 1995). In his short story ''La bestia ha muerto'' (2005), Bernardo Fernández Bef, one of Mexico’s leading science fiction authors, envisions the preparations for the tenth anniversary of the Second Mexican Empire in 1872. Fernández constructs a steampunk alternate reality in which the republican army neither overthrew the Empire nor executed Maximilian of Habsburg in 1867. Instead, the Empire expands to encompass Central America. Fernández enriches this historical metafiction with elements of science fiction and introduces contemporary technology to reimagine Benito Juárez, the republican leader, as a posthuman entity in the form of a computer virus. My analysis seeks to integrate theories of speculative fiction and alternative worlds with cultural memory studies to assess the effects of counterfactual historical fiction as a special reflexive mode within the rhetoric of collective memory (Erll, 2008). By analyzing the memory-work—both in relation to Mexican national history and the literary canon—as a cultural and social practice, and worldmaking as a literary and imaginative endeavor, I interrogate how Fernandez’s narrative interacts with and challenges existing collective memories surrounding Maximilian, Juárez, and the Second Mexican Empire. More broadly, this paper reflects on the interplay between imagining (im)possible past futures and the act of remembering. It explores the constraints memory imposes on imagination and the ways in which imagination reshapes memory. Drawing on the concept of collective temporal thought (Yamashiro, 2021), I consider whether the distinction between imaginative work and memory-work remains viable in the context of speculative historical narratives.

This work explores a cosmology of Marajó Island, located in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, through the life of the pajé (shaman) Zeneida Lima, 91 years old, and her relationship with the Caruanas, spiritual forces present on the island, known as entities emerging from the waters. In addition to coexisting in the spiritual realm, the Caruanas also inhabit the imagination of Amazonian popular culture as mythological beings, appearing in oral traditions as legends of local “folklore.” Throughout her life, guided by the Caruanas, Zeneida produced a series of illustrations seeking to represent or translate the physical form of these enchanted beings that dwell at the bottom of the river, figures that move between the human and the animalistic. In the course of writing this research, I focus on understanding the abstraction involved in the creation process of these images, which Zeneida rarely discusses in her interviews with the press or researchers. Considering the poetic possibilities of Zeneida’s oral expression, the writing of this work is guided by Biodrama, an Argentine theatrical aesthetic developed by Vivi Tellas (2001), which uses the real biography of individuals as raw material for a narrative that can be revealed and transformed into a theatrical even, in this case, through dramaturgy. As the main foundation for this production, I draw upon a series of interviews conducted in person with Zeneida on Marajó Island, as well as literary analyses based on accounts from her autobiographical book The Mystical World of the Caruanas of Marajó Island (1976).

Research Questions: How does Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) frame the more than human as potential witness to atrocity? What is at stake in expanding ethical and political frameworks of memory to include animal and botanical agencies? Methodology: This paper positions The Zone of Interest within posthuman and environmental turns in memory studies, tracing its construction of a distributed network of witnessing “after” and alongside the human (Richardson and Zolkos, 2022). It identifies two junctures of more than human attestation. First, the film’s careful layering of image and sound scape suggests that the dog (Dilla) belonging to Auschwitz Commandant Hoss’s family responds to the material and aural indicators of violence emerging from the Auschwitz camp. The paper reads Dilla’s movements alongside David L. Clark’s (2015) Derridean reflections on a terrier that appears briefly in the silent 1941 Liepāja atrocity footage, a “strange witness” whose movements become an index of unheard gunshots. Secondly, the film’s depiction of human ashes used as compost in the Hoss family’s garden is placed in dialogue with Georges Didi Huberman’s (2017) reflections on wildflowers growing on Birkenau’s cremation pits. These plants emerge from the dissolution of human form yet bear biochemical witness to mass murder. Findings: The film prompts attentiveness to fragile, fleeting, and contingent forms of more-than-human witnessing in the process of occurring (as the sedimentation of ash and canine tracing of sound and smell, for example) and as complexly entangled with human responses to mass violence, including the viewers’ own. While botanical and animal agencies are unevenly distributed, their presence challenges the genocidal logic that renders some lives disposable, while also complicating anthropocentric frameworks of memory and justice. The film calls for an expanded ethical and political imagination that recognises the entangled agencies of nonhuman actors in registering atrocity.

The commemoration of national holidays and mediated representations of history can be understood as different but related techniques that shape memory of the past to promote and legitimize national narratives in the present (mnemotechniques). This paper explores how these mnemotechniques interact with each other during national anniversaries and how film representations of national holiday celebrations play a similar role in legitimizing historical narratives, through a comparison of Independence Day celebrations in the post-1991 Czech Republic and Estonia. Specifically, the paper examines the Estonian animated short series *Lotte-Leiutajateküla – Eesti 90* (Gadgetville – Estonia 90) and the Czech animated short film Jak *Pejsek s Kočičkou Slavili 28. Říjen* (How the Doggie and the Kitty Celebrated October 28) and these films’ connections to the commemorations of Estonian Independence Day (24 February 1918) and Czechoslovak Independence Day (28 October 1918). Even though these two films engage with explicit narratives of the past to different extents, they both illustrate how memory emerges through social collaboration through practices of commemoration. Through a close reading of the two films and drawing from research on the role of animation in mediating the past, the paper argues that through the choices of non-human characters and fictional or ambiguous settings, these films engage in memory-making by symbolizing the nation. As such, the two films directly engage in political discourse by supporting the rehabilitation of narratives of national independence and sovereignty in the first two decades after the fall of Communism.