The Politics of Reenactment and Postmemory in Argentina
According to Rebecca Schneider in Performing Remains (2011), “reenactment has become the popular and practice-based wing of what has been called the twentieth-century academic ‘memory industry’” (p.
2). Scholars from the Southern Cone countries emerging from authoritarian contexts, particularly Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, advanced the developing field of memory studies. In the aftermath of Argentina’s last military dictatorship, influential scholars such as Elizabeth Jelin (2002), Emilio Crenzel (2008), and Claudia Feld (2002) pioneered new perspectives on memory and human rights. Likewise, human rights organizations such as The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo), The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo), and HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence; Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio) have mobilized collectively to combat the injustices of the past. In the case of post-dictatorship Argentina, the boom in memory studies correlates to a cultural explosion in reenactment practices, and more generally offers proof of the growing influence globally of reenactment in the arts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Arns, 2007; Blackson, 2007; de Laet, 2017; Lutticken, 2005; Schneider, 2011).The field of reenactment studies is poised to make a significant contribution to the extensive body of scholarly work on postmemory in post-dictatorship Argentina. Marianne Hirsch (2008) coined the term in 1992 to describe “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (p. 103). The concept of postmemory has received a mixed reception from scholars working on Argentine cultural production.
Scholars have expressed a range of responses—from approval to uneasiness and outright criticism—to the application of the concept of postmemory in post-dictatorship Argentina in their discussions of the artistic work of a second generation, the children of those who experienced the dictatorship as adults (Blejmar, 2010; Hernandez, 2011; Maguire, 2017; Montez, 2017; Perez, 2013; Sosa, 2014).For Blejmar (2010), the concept is too homogenizing and, at least in relation to My Life After, the varied perspectives and range of experiences presented in the play point to postmemories plural (p. 3). Perez (2013) suggests that postmemory divides the experiences of first and second generations too rigidly, and she makes the vital point that some experiences of the children of the so-called second generation (for example, witnessing their parents’ abduction or experiencing orphanhood) constitute traumatizing first-hand experiences in their own right (p. 9). Sosa (2015), in contrast, praises the potential of the postmemory framework for fostering “transnational dialogues with Argentina’s post-dictatorship scene” but is more critical on two points that are important for this discussion on reenactment. She writes, “Still, I contend that the postmemorial model of the transmission of trauma fails to account for (i) the uneasy temporality that governs the local aftermath of loss, and for (ii) the urgency to bring back the work on affect to more grounded social and political contexts” (p. 361).In the field of performance studies, foundational theories like Richard Schechner’s (1985) “twice-behaved behavior” and Joseph Roach’s (1996) “surrogation” invoke the temporal repetition that is inherent to performance and is likewise central to the concept and practice of reenactment. Techniques such as the superimposition of photographs, the juxtaposition of before and after images, and the reenactment of events onstage all seem to collapse present and past time, inviting viewers to indulge in the fantasy of traveling to the past or experiencing the past while situated in the present.
But these techniques also draw attention to the irretrievability of the past event and the spectral quality of return (Nichols, 2008, p. 74). Shifting the focus toward reenactment in post-dictatorship cultural production, and specifically here in our consideration of Arias’s work, allows us to attend more thoughtfully to the interplay between temporality, performance, and inter-generationality. It also encourages us to examine how reenactment practices might engage the politics of post-dictatorship in Argentina differently. Specifically, the practice of reenactment employed by a second generation of artists complicates the binary between (first generation) embodiment and (second generation) memory imposed by the postmemory paradigm. The performers’ reenactment of their parents’ experiences constitutes an act of bodily reappropriation that is both a tribute to their parents’ lives and subtle resistance to the notion of inheritance of memory that is central to the concept of postmemory.Arias’s play establishes dialogue with other documentary works concerned with intergenerational transmission in the aftermath of mass violence such as the Cambodian film We Want [u] to Know (2009), directed by Ella Pugliese. Stephanie Benzaquen (2022 writes compellingly of how the film “documents a process of transmission, the effort to foster a communal conversation about the past and its long-term effects” (chapter in this volume). Reenactment in this film “functions as a radical way of initiating a dialogue between older villagers and younger generations in Thnol Lok”The Body as Time Machine 251 (Chapter 15 in this volume). While in We Want [u] to Know, a main objective of this intergenerational dialogue is to teach a younger generation about the war, the intergenerational functions differently in Arias’s play. First and foremost, the performers onstage all belong to a second generation, and they are in charge of reenacting both their parents’ experiences of dictatorship and their own. For Carla Crespo, one of the performers whose father was killed during the dictatorship, doubling as both her father and herself onstage provides an opportunity for an imagined encounter. Yet another significant difference in Arias’s work is that the focus on the intergenera- tional is less about the transmission of knowledge and more about how a younger generation takes ownership of creating narratives of the dictatorship from their own perspective and in their own actions and words.