An open guest lecture by Adriana Minardi, University of Buenos Aires.
We bury the dead (2005), by Zak Hilditch.
What happens when memories of dictatorship travel across voices and borders? This paper examines literary narratives of Barcelona under Francoism, and places them in dialogue with Argentina’s testimonial literature. Drawing on Todorov’s assertions about the duty of bearing witness and Lotman’s ideas on a dialectics of memory, it argues that censorship inadvertently nurtured alternative semantic domains and resistant cultural texts. Memory emerges here as a creative practice of recovery and reinvention: rebuilding social bonds, reshaping cities as discursive stages, and forging polyphonic, transnational spaces of remembrance that challenge official histories.
What is the cultural significance of memory? How and why do we remember the past, not only as individuals but across generations, as social and cultural communities? And how do these memory practices relate to politically and emotionally charged questions of national or ethnic identity, historical traumas, and experiences of dislocation, loss and forgetting?
