The sword,the pen,and the uterus: multidirectional feminist culture and the Argentine dictatorship of 1976–1983

During the period 1982–1999, a cohort of feminist cultural activists highlighted parallels between the political, gendered, racial, and linguistic frameworks used to justify state violence in Argentina of 1976–1983 and in Germany of 1933–1945. Their cultural works indicate the transnational aspects of Argentina’s failures of modernity, and the parallel responsibilities to trauma memory assumed by women and Jews as marginalized members of society, who consequently emerge as both local and transnational agents of democratization. A number of scholars have noted Argentine writers’ and playwrights’ adoption of Holocaust cultural constructs to represent the 1976–1983 dictatorship, yet these cultural contributions have not yet been studied from the combined perspectives of post-Holocaust and post-dictatorship feminist scholarship. By providing a gendered analysis of “Holocaust multidirectionality” within a global arena of “postmemory,” this article shows the convergence of the two terms in the cultural production of women who remember, represent, and transmit the experience and meaning of the Argentine military dictatorship.     

Material mnemonics and competing narratives in Palestine-Israel

Since 1948 the re-designation of depopulated Palestinian villages as national parks has evoked Lippet’s “cartography of nowhere”, as ruins and unmarked sites are subsumed in the process of material forgetting. Juxtaposing narratives and material mnemonics, this article assumes the villages of Deir Yassin, Suba, Kufr Bir’im and Iqrit as case studies to determine the extent to which memory infuses ruins with the ability to counter contemporary narratives. The article subsequently explores the use of debris in the sustenance of national memory, and questions how far “haunting” the land through commemorative tours and in situ story-telling renders the ruins noeuds de mémoire, as opposed to lieux de mémoire. Finally, the transition of the ruins from sites of history to sites of activism is charted through the use of theatre and technology that draw on the past and present as forms of cultural resistance.