The Visual Cultures of Disappearance 

The Visual Cultures of Disappearance 

Dr Geoffrey Maguire 

This seminar will explore cinematic and photographic representations of political disappearance in Argentina, specifically from the perspective of the ‘postmemory generation’ or the ‘1.5 generation’ (Hirsch 2008; Suleiman 2002). Against the backdrop of ‘the memory turn’ in the late twentieth century, and in the wake of the most recent Argentine dictatorship, visual cultures of disappearance have explored how trauma is shared between generations, recalibrating what we understand as the role and nature of witnessing, testimony, memory and victimhood. The three works considered in this seminar approach the task of remembering – referred to over the post-dictatorship period by politicians, activists and academics as ‘an impulse’, ‘un deber’, ‘un derecho’, an ‘obsession’ or a ‘burden’ – in subjective, often provocative ways. By examining how these works turn to the realms of creativity, imagination and reflexivity in their explorations of the past, the seminar will analyse the politics and aesthetics of collective remembrance ‘at a generational remove’ in contemporary Latin America (Hirsch 2008). 

Please note: No expertise in film studies or photography is required for this seminar. We will, instead, be examining what these visual cultures reveal about the socio-political development of memory politics across the twenty-first century in Argentina.   

Key Words 

  • testimonial narratives, fiction, fantasy, and reflexivity 

  • human rights discourses and the dictatorship 

  • the shifting politics of memory in the post-dictatorship era 

  • figures of guilt, complicity, victimhood, agency 

  • second-generation memory and post-memory 

  • HIJOS, militancy and the family 

Essential Viewing 

  • Los rubios, dir. Albertina Carri (documentary film, 2003) [Available here] 
  • Infancia clandestina, dir. Benjamín Ávila (fiction film, 2010) [Available here] 
  • Filiación, Lucila Quieto (photo essay, 1999-2013) [Available here] 

Essential Reading 

  • Nouzeilles, Gabriela. ‘Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 14: 3 (2005), 263-278. 
  • Thomas, Sarah. ‘Rupture and Reparation: Postmemory, the Child Seer, and Graphic Violence in Infancia clandestina’. Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 12: 3 (2015), 235-254.  

Further Reading 

  • Aguilar, Gonzalo. ‘Infancia clandestina or the Will of Faith’. Journal of Romance Studies, 13: 3 (2013), 17-31. 
  • Aguilar, Gonzalo. New Argentine Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).  
  • Amado, Ana. La imagen justa: Cine argentino y política (1980-2007) (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2009). [Chapter on Los rubios.] 
  • Anderman, Jens. ‘Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 21: 2 (2012), 165-187. 
  • Andermann, Jens. New Argentine Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). 
  • Garibotto, Verónica. Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). [Chapters on Los rubios and Infancia clandestina.] 
  • Hirsch, Marianne. ‘The Generation of Postmemory’. Poetics Today 29: 1 (Spring 2008), 103-128. 
  • Lazzara, Michael. ‘Filming Loss: (Post-)Memory, Subjectivity, and the Performance of Failure in Recent Argentine Documentary Films’. Latin American Perspectives, 36: 5 (2009), 147-157.  
  • Maguire, Geoffrey. The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). [Chapter on Infancia clandestina.]  
  • Page, Joanna. Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). [Chapter on Los rubios.]  
  • Sarlo, Beatriz. Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo; Una discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005). 
  • Taylor, Diana. ‘“You Are Here”: The DNA of Performance’. TDR: The Drama Review, 46: 1 (2002), 149-169.  
  • van Alphen, Ernst. ‘Second-Generation Testimony, the Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory’. Poetics Today, 27 (2006), 473-488.