Abstract
In this chapter, I consider the interpersonal pathways of traumatic histories and memories. I focus on the transmission of emotions and affect as structuring of individual and group identities as well as of the continuously refashioned public sphere itself. I explore the role of the transmission of emotions and affects with regard to how and why they can stir individuals and collectives to such an extent that the past continues to operate as a source of social and political division. Drawing on contemporary theories of the emotional and affective transmission of memories, I explore the verbal and non-verbal ways in which traumatic memories are communicated between individuals and across generations. In particular, I look to artistic forms of the expression of affect, including recent books and films that explore the lives of children of the desaparecidos, as a way of understanding how the affective registration of memories of one individual’s past in one generation can also be experienced as a traumatic memory at a later stage in another generation. How are existing political and ideological antagonisms between collective memorial cultures intensified if we take into account the transmission of unintegrated memories of violence?
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Jorge Julio López is a survivor of one of the military’s clandestine detention centres. He was forcefully abducted and disappeared between 1976 and 1979. He was again kidnapped in September 2006 on his way to court to testify against renowned perpetrator of human rights abuses, Miguel Etchecolatz, the ex-director general of police investigations for Buenos Aires province. He has remained disappeared ever since.
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Maurice Halbwachs (1992) originally asserted that, rather than residing within the individual, memories are formed and organised within a collective context, and that as a result various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behaviour. In other words, Halbwachs (1992) believes that the memory of individuals is influenced by the social context in which they function and that virtually all experiences and perceptions are shaped by one individual’s interaction with another. Halbwachs makes the important observation that collective memory deals with “memory in the group, and not memory of the group” (Bartlett, cited in Wertsch 2002, p. 22). He writes: “While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember” (Bartlett, cited in Wertsch 2002, p. 48). Collective memories thus emerge as members of a group, who have all participated in an event being remembered, share and discuss memories based on their individual experiences—although some may remember events differently from others (Wertsch 2002). Memory is thus an intersubjective process, derived from people remembering and sharing memories together (Halbwachs 1992).
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Ahmed (2004b) argues that emotions are about objects that shape, but are at the same time also shaped by, contact with these objects themselves. The object need not have a material existence to work in this way but can also be something imagined. For example, an individual can have a memory of something, and that memory can trigger a feeling (Pugmire, cited in Ahmed 2004b, p. 7): “The memory can be the object of my feeling in both senses: the feeling is shaped by contact with the memory, and also involves an orientation towards what is remembered.” An individual might feel pain when they remember an event, and in remembering the event they might attribute pain to what is remembered (Ahmed 2004b).
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Chavista is a term used to describe the political ideology based on the ideas and programs associated with the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.
- 5.
At the time of her birth in the ESMA, Donda’s mother, with the help of the attending nurse, threaded little pieces of blue cotton through her daughter’s ear lobes so that she could be recognised (Donda 2010).
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Stockwell, J. (2014). Social Forces Shaping Memory Transmission. In: Reframing the Transitional Justice Paradigm. Springer Series in Transitional Justice, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03853-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03853-7_6
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