UC Santa Cruz

I bring together two areas of scholarship – memory studies and theories of built space – in order to examine cultural responses to trauma in late 20th- and 21st- century Latin America. Each chapter charts the work of Latin American women writers of the post-trauma or post-dictatorship generation: the aftermath of dictatorships in Chile (Nona Fernández) and Argentina (Tununa Mercado), the legacies of the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico (Ana Clavel), and responses to the Shining Path in Peru (Karina Pacheco Medrano). My study is the first to bring these lesser-known women authors – joined together by their political engagement with the tension between spaces of collective and individual memory – into comparative analysis. They mark a shift in writing about trauma; each revisits unfinished histories from a perspective of temporal and/or spatial distance – through the lens of exile, of an “inheritor” of memory, or of a member of the second generation. Forming a “shadow canon,” these texts articulate a gender-specific reading of trauma through the female body’s interaction with the built environment. Within these fictional responses to trauma, corporeally experienced events become enmeshed in relationships to public space.

Through fiction-writing – a practice central to the process of political critique in Latin America – these authors react to the deliberate altering of cityspaces by authoritarian regimes. Their literary return to potential sites of collective memory (monuments or memorials) marks absence, and seeks to reclaim what was lost in the radical transformation of the urban landscape. I focus on the way that the past is publicly encountered or mapped onto the contours of the city, as the authors place the reader in the ethical position of engaging in conversation with urban sites of memory.

This literary undertaking engages the collective political unconscious, and advances social healing. My work underscores the importance of understanding the social systems and urban trajectories of societies emerging from dictatorship and colonial histories – where the bodies of ethnic minorities and women indicate a continuing pattern of oppression. Fiction allows for a fuller articulation of diverse subjects living in complex urban spaces, and examines the intellectual and social work of extending human freedom.