Haunted homes and desert landscapes: the sites of memory in latin american postdictatorship fiction

Abstract

 How do contemporary Latin American authors and artists represent the harrowing memory of the military dictatorships? How does art and literature account for the confluence of private and public memory of authoritarianism, between individual and national trauma? And finally, how do narrative and pictorial discourses reconcile – or at least acknowledge – the diverging accounts of the past? This essay first briefly examines representations of the brutality of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes in the plastic arts. It will consider how artists such as Iván Navarro (Chile), Fernando Traverso (Argentina), Cildo Meirelles (Brazil) and Luis Camintzer (Uruguay) work with everyday objects to broach the issues of oppression and recollection. This discussion will then segue into an analysis of two recent novels, one from Brazil, Fernando Bonassi’s Prova contrária (2003) and another from Chile, Carlos Franz’s El desierto (2005), that recover the threads that associate history (i.e. public recollection) to memory (this is, private remembrance); the past to the present.