Inheritance: Living Memory, Leaving Countries. Uruguayan and Argentinean Fictionalization at the Turn of the Millennium.

Abstract

My research considers how contemporary film and literature in Argentina and Uruguay reflects the postdictatorship generation’s inheritance of the past. I examine a series of fictions for explicit and implicit references to this second generation’s understanding of the 1970s guerrilla movement and the 1980s dictatorial repression. In Los rubios (Argentina, 2003), Albertina Carri, daughter of disappeared activists, touches on the limitations of memory and representation to reach both her parents’ history and absence. With Buena vida delivery (Argentina 2004), I consider the concept of heredity. 25 watts (Uruguay 2001) provides insight into how the displacement of revolutionary guerrilla in the collective memory has affected the later generation’s understanding of politics. The poem “El Ignorante” (Argentina, 2004) by Juan Terranova and the novel El Exilio Según Nicolás (Uruguay, 2004) by Gabriel Peveroni link economic migration at the turn of the millennium with political exile during the military dictatorships.