Genocide as a tool to forget, literature as a tool to remember: the Shoah and the Dictatorship in Argentine literature

Abstract

In the orbit of postmemory, inheriting the experience of the elders is a topic revisited over and over by contemporary Argentine writers. This article focuses on the analysis of four works of recent Argentine literature that recover the stories of ancestors in the form of family memories, but also propose a reflection on the transmissibility of these memories and the burden that they place on a person. Based on the overlapping of family experiences during different genocidal processes, the texts postulate an erasure of geographical and temporal borders, which affects the presentation of the facts and which, based on this mechanism, persist in a present that melts with the past or the future. Between the persistence and overlapping of genocidal memories and trauma understood as inheritance, the analyzed productions seem to pursue an emancipatory goal, according to one of Walter Benjamin's famous theses on history.