Professor Patrick Dove
Email: pdove@indiana.edu

S708 	Seminar in Hispanic Studies
	Topic: Dictatorship, Terror and Memory

T 4:00pm – 6:30pm/section #24890/Ballantine Hall 335

In this seminar we will examine the impact of military dictatorship
and State terrorism in different regions of Latin America. The
central focus will be on how and why cultural production seeks to
remember violence, terror and loss. At the same time, we will look
at how certain cultural texts and practices challenge or
problematize traditional notions of remembrance while bearing
witness to experiences that approach the limits of what can be named
or imagined.

The historical context will be defined by relatively recent
political conflict in the Southern Cone (the national security
states of the 1970’s and 80’s) and Peru (the conflict between
Sendero Luminoso and the military in the 1980’s and 90’s). We will
also see how “globalization” and the hegemonic rise of neoliberalism
throughout Latin America shape and/or conflict with the question of
what it means to remember.

Readings will be drawn from fiction, essays, testimonial and
journalistic writing, as well as visual media. Primary texts might
include novels and shorter works by Sergio Chejfec, Diamela Eltit,
Tununa Mercado, Ricardo Piglia, and Mario Vargas Llosa; selections
from testimonial and journalistic texts by Luz Arce, Miguel Bonasso,
Lilian Celiberti, Mauricio Rosencof, and Patricia Verdugo, as well
as reports from Truth and Reconciliation commissions. Visual
material will include Patricio Guzmán’s documentary film "La memoria
obstinada", several feature films (including Marianne Eyde’s "La
vida es una sola", Marco Bechis’s "Garage Olimpo", and Francisco
Lombardi’s "La boca del lobo"), and televised interviews with former
participants and victims of repression. Time permitting, we will
also examine recent attempts to construct memorials and museums at
sites of detention and torture. Secondary sources will provide
historical background and introduce some of the theoretical
discourses and debates which arise in the wake of dictatorship,
including questions of collective memory, justice, mourning, trauma
and the changing role of culture and intellectuals in post-
dictatorship society. Secondary readings include essays by Caruth,
Derrida, Deleuze, Felman and Laub, Freud, Halbwachs, Hardt and
Negri, Hegel, Huyssen, Jameson, Jelin, Manrique, Richard, Sarlo, and
Scarry.


Please note that this course description changed. The previous topic
was Latin Americanism.