The Spectral Politics of Memory in Contemporary Argentinean Novel
Disappearance has been described as a political practice that makes epistemological doubt itself a form of domination. Uncertainty becomes a medium of terror: a person is illegally abducted and we don’t know what happened to him, where he is, if he is alive or dead. This uncertainty gives the disappeared and the experience of disappearance underwent by Argentine society and spectral dimension in which the real acquires a ghostly structure.
The project seeks to investigate the Disappeared as ghost in contemporary Argentinean novels that deal with the social and cultural effects of the dictatorship. Ghosts are defined as the trace of those who have not been allowed to leave a trace. This spectral figure constitutes contemporary Argentinean literature, in which the past remains as a ghostly presence that cannot be suppressed precisely because it lacks tangible form. ¿How the liminal figure of the ghost –between life and death, presence and absence, past and present– shape the social body? ¿How does it disturb the stability of time, space and subjectivity? ¿How the characters of these novels deal with them and therefore with the effects of terror in current society?
“La figura del desaparecido en la narrativa argentina contemporánea 1995 -2011” “Narratives of Terror and Disappearance: Fantastic Dimensions of the Argentine Collective Memory”, Universität Heidelberg.
“The redefinition of Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin American literature and Film”, KULeuven – Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.