Cynthia Sarti (UNIFESP), Aline Lopes Murillo (UNIFESP), Sofia Gutierrez (UNIFESP) This roundtable explores how experiences of political violence (persecution, torture, exile) during Brazilian dictatorships are inscribed in memory through affects, emotions, and practices of reconstructing life. Drawing on the anthropology of memory and violence, it shifts the focus from historical events to the situated forms of inhabiting pain, reweaving social bonds, and making sense of life after devastation. Following Veena Das (2020) and Cynthia Sarti (2021), memory is understood not as the "recovery" of a wounded past, but as an ethical and relational labor through which people re-elaborate lived experiences and rediscover, in different ways, the possibilities of continuing life. Taking exile and political violence as an analytical axis, the roundtable approaches it not only as geographical displacement or political rupture but as a sensitive condition that reconfigures ways of being in the world. If violence marks the death of the world as it was inhabited before, it also offers the possibility of reconstructing it in other terms. The "work of time", as formulated by Das (2020), thus becomes an analytical tool for grasping the continuities and transformations that enable people to re-inhabit the world after destruction. This perspective allows us to think of political violence also as a terrain in which it is possible to apprehend the reinvention of belonging, language, and forms of care. Cynthia Sarti (UNIFESP) examines the relationship between pain and language through memories of the violence during the Brazilian dictatorship. Analyzing testimonies of tortured and exiled men and women, she highlights how narratives construct the intelligibility of the event and reveal how the experience of violence becomes inscribed in life, transfigured into memory, and how people seek to find a place and a voice as subjects rather than as victims. Aline Lopes Murillo (UNIFESP) analyzes testimonies of sons and daughters of exiles from the book "Crianças e Exílio: memórias de infância marcadas pela ditadura military" (Marques & Oliveira, 2025), exploring how they reinhabit spaces marked by forced displacement and how exile operates today as a living component of social memory, producing generational forms of agency. Sofia Pieruccetti Gutierrez (UNIFESP) deepens the discussion by examining how the experience of political persecution is elaborated in the autobiographies of two Brazilian communist militants, Maria Werneck de Castro and Beatriz Bandeira Ryff. She focuses on the historical imagination at work in these texts, attending to how the authors weave their own experiences into a transnational genealogy of oppression and resistance. Reading these memoirs as deliberate acts of imaginative elaboration rather than as transparent records of suffering, she shows how exile and persecution generate not only pain but also a perceptive and narrative grammar through which life after political violence is made thinkable.
20260731T173020260731T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires11.4. Affects and Emotions in the Memories of Twentieth-Century Brazilian DictatorshipsSVE1MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
