The post-memory crisis and the horizon of survivals: memory battlegrounds in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

This article focuses on the slippery concept of “post-memory” that emerged in the 1990s in a cultural rather than historical context. Trying to decipher its points of strength and weakness, situated in particular in the Brazilian case, the analysis questions whether this critical reconfiguration of the memory of the second and successive generations has contributed - or not - to being included in the contemporary debate on saving memories at risk. The practice of “desaparecimento forçado” (forced disappearing) and its (im)possible memory inheritance for other generations offers an extreme point for the critical reflection. Even though it emerged in the post-Shoah context, post-memory finds applications in different critical contexts – as in the case of military authoritarianism in Latin America and the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). After a review of the conceptual debate, the pars construens of the reflection seeks to verify whether the analytical disassembly of the postmemory, associated with the figure of survivals (see Pasolini, Didi-Huberman, Warburg, Benjamin), may provide a new critical dimension, through which to rethink the transmission of memory and the economy of inheritance. From this rearticulation, a politics of survivals may perhaps reformulate, in its alliance with fields such as literature or arts, an alternative and possible relationship with the past.