Diasporic Argentine and Chilean identities in Britain: the traces of dictatorship in second-generation ‘postmemory’
Institute for the Study of the Americas
Alejandra Serpente (ISA) received KT funding to assist with the costs of a symposium, Between the past and the future: Challenging narratives of memory in Latin America, hosted at ISA on 23-24 November 2010. Alejandra organised the event together with Cecilia Sosa (from QMUL’s drama department, researching on Argentina's dictatorship aftermath) in collaboration with IGRS’s Centre for Cultural Memory. Jens Andermann (Birkbeck), Susannah Radstone (UEL), and Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths) were also contributors.
The symposium's key speaker was Elizabeth Jelin, a prominent scholar in Argentina and founder of the Núcleo de Estudios sobre Memoria (Memory Study Group) at the IDES – Institute for Economic and Social Development in Buenos Aires . Jelin has extensively analysed the human rights movement in Argentina from the end of the military regime in the early 1980s. Her presence offered an excellent opportunity for scholars in the UK and beyond to engage with the new ideas generated at the IDES that deserve a wider audience.
Additionally, the event allowed researchers from the UK and Europe working on issues of cultural memory in Latin America to discuss ways of approaching the post-dictatorial periods in Latin American contexts. New interventions in the discourses of memory were encouraged in order to map the emergence of new transcultural ‘memory communities’, create new academic links and develop future research.
