Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America

Conclusion. Marketing Discontent: The Political Economy of Memory in Latin America

c o n c l u s i o n a l i c e a . n e l s o n Marketing Discontent The Political Economy of Memory in Latin America I n his essay “Memory and Forgetting,” Benedict Anderson suggests that mechanisms for institutionalizing historical memory—whether textbooks , museums, maps, or even a name—always simultaneously carry with them modes of forgetting. The very call for memory implies that something considered essential is being forgotten: “Having to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be ‘reminded’ turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies .”1 Moreover, any representation will include some things and not others, which then do not figure in the official memory of the nation. Even more crucial, those very things that are included, once fixed, move toward a kind of stasis that itself becomes memory’s opposite. The “modern accumulation of documentary evidence,” Anderson writes, “ . . . simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory.”2 Nevertheless, he contends, the nation’s “biography” relies on the establishment of a narrative in which “violent deaths must be remembered/ forgotten as ‘our own.’”3 Clearly, which deaths and which people figure in this construction of what is “our own” are part of an ongoing contest of interests fully enmeshed in a given society’s structures of power, in terms both of race/class/ gender relations and governmental policy, and of the pervasive influence of the capitalist marketplace. In the current context of globalization, in which flows of people, money, ideas, and communications across borders all confound the status of the nation itself, national memory processes are bound up in transnational questions of human rights advocacy as well as in 340 | alice a. nelson globally structured inequities that have largely deepened over the last three decades. In this sense, memory formation is nothing if not a conflictual, mobile process: less a static repository of meanings from the past than a radically contested dynamic of rethinking relationships between the past and the present, potentially bringing out tentative links, new readings, or alternative interpretations. As Diana Taylor would have it, the “repertoire” of performed meanings, rather than the fixed “archive,” more effectively conveys the multiple and potentially contradictory memories stemming from a nation’s recent past, particularly in the context of political violence. At the same time, Taylor holds, “the archive and the repertoire exist in a constant state of interaction,”4 defining themselves dialectically against and through one another. Memory formation is never innocent of the intersecting local and global power relationships it simultaneously enacts and rebuts, invokes and potentially rewrites. Moreover, any gesture toward recuperating historical memory is always simultaneously about two moments and contexts: the moment rememFigure 1. Making reference to Mario Benedetti’s poetry collection, El olvido está lleno de memoria (Forgetting Is Full of Memory), this installation at Villa Grimaldi in Santiago emphasizes the simultaneity of remembering/forgetting, presence/absence. (Photograph by Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson) Conclusion | 341 bered as well as the moment of remembering, the context of past events and the present context for their recollection. The historical and economic forces shaping those moments and contexts may be more or less similar, but both remain operative, even as some aspect of the present presumably has become different enough from the past to allow the emergence of signs/ narratives/images once repressed. The unresolved tensions between the two contexts are enacted and replayed through the promotion of memory, including (but not limited to) its marketing; clearly, those tensions are as much about the present as they are about the past. (Per Rebecca J. Atencio, e.g., Globo’s arguably self-serving promotion of the popular Anos Rebeldes miniseries had at least as much to do with revising the company’s proauthoritarian image in the present as it did with engaging the past.) To these two moments we should add a third: the moment of reception and interpretation, continuously evolving over time in relation to the other two. Consideration of memory processes and products by necessity involves examination of the tensions and contradictions within and between these three times and the conflicting political, economic, and social interests they involve. Given this orientation to memory, what, then, is particular to the recent histories of remembering/forgetting in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico, explored in this volume? Two aspects seem...