Feminist
Traces of Memory Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean
A
Review by Tatiana Quintero (Tatiana.Quintero@gcsc.uni-giessen.de)
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (Giessen)
Fronseca Santos, Melody/ Georgina Rivas Hernández/ Tito Mitjans Alayón
(eds.): Memoria y feminismos: cuerpos, sentipensares y resistencias.
Buenos Aires: CLASCO/Siglo XXI, 2023. 429 pages, Open Access. ISBN:
978-987-813-461-1.
Abstract
The
book Memoria y Feminismos: Cuerpos, sentipensares y resistencias
is a collective effort of different authors to contribute to the debates
on memory in Latin America and the Caribbean. The texts reflect on
corporality and political practices of memory. Across thirteen articles
the authors deploy the postulates of corpo-politics and feminist
standpoint theory as a theoretical framework. The volume presents a
critical approach and questions the role of Eurocentric academia while
giving insights into localized and experience-oriented research.
Review
The
book Memoria y Feminismos: Cuerpos, sentipensares, y resistencias
(Feminisms: Bodies, Sentipensares and Resistance) emerged from a political
and academic commitment to depict a critical epistemological approach from
Latin America and the Caribbean. Readers are introduced to a wide range of
approaches and tools for developing critical research and understanding
memory as a humanized concept in close relation to feminist
manifestations.
The volume is a groundbreaking analysis of memory and its practices as a
mechanism for empowering political subjects. The foundation for this is
the collective memory of a traumatic past, which operates as the common
ground for the growth of Latin American and Caribbean memory studies. The
interdisciplinary approach of the book explores new contributions from
Latin American and Caribbean academia while vindicating the “differential
awareness of historically marginalized populations such as women, sexual
dissidents, indigenous, and Afro-descendant populations” (p. 12).
The regional context provides space to explore memory from a political
perspective, which reclaims this concept as a means to reach truth and
justice. Further, this allows for fruitful analysis and debates about the
socio-cultural shapes of national historical narratives in El Salvador and
Guatemala, archival research in Brazil, Cuba, and Chile, and collective
action, for instance, in Argentina and Mexico.
The book points to the notion of memory as a “space for dismantling the
cis-heteropatriarchal system in all its dimensions” (p. 10). Thus, the
authors take their academic and political guidance from the postulates of
three perspectives. First, the Corpo-politics of knowledge: a decolonial
construction that highlights how knowledge is an embedded element in
bodies with a contextualization defined by a social environment and
subjectivities. Second, it provides a critical feminist research approach:
it fosters the inclusion of gender analysis within critical theory.
Finally, it operates from a feminist standpoint theory, which advocates an
analysis of social location and political struggles as an impulse to
develop divergent knowledge (p. 20).
One of the main contributions of the authors is presenting memory in its
humanized dimension in the service of the dignity of historically
marginalized peoples. Consequently, the first step is to acknowledge the
colonial practices of dispossession and the agency with which these
subjects have reconstructed their narratives, symbols, and existence. The
result is a set of thirteen articles using feminist epistemologies, each
of them takes up different cases, places, and emphases in analyzing class,
race, ethnic belonging, and gender, but also museology, and spaces of
memory.
The volume is divided thematically into three sections. The first,
“Violencias y luchas por y desde la memoria,” focuses on the emergence of
the feminist movement and women’s strategies of resistance to violence in
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile. In this part, the article by Marta
Casaús Arzú stands out. Dealing with violence as a tool for social control
against Mayan women in Guatemala, it explains how violence against female
bodies operates, first, as a symbolic mechanism of domination and, second,
as a tool to construct a hypermasculinization that supports the
imaginaries of identity and power. These two elements are exacerbated in
contexts of dissimilar ethnic belonging or where cultural differences are
prominent. Casaús Arzú writes:
The ethnic origin
and the racial traces trigger hate, derision, humiliation, and rejection
in the perpetrators, who exert double and triple violence: for being
women, for being
indigenous, and for supposedly being
‘subversives' but the harm is not only physical but rather cultural and
territorial […].“ (p. 39)
The second section, “Memoria, cuerpos y archivos: Rupturas desde las
disidencias”, reflects on how preserving memory relates to dissident
practices that can lead to archives embracing diversity (p. 22). Thus,
Tito Mitjans Alayón presents an archive process he led in Mexico and named
“Memorias prietas disidentes en el sur de México.” The author portrays the
challenges arising due to the deliberate erasure of black identity in
Mexico through the discourse of mestizaje. Using first-person narration,
Mitjans Alayón presents how coloniality gives space to a problem of
representation that is summed up in the depictions of the ‘other’ from the
perspectives of mainly white men. Alayón shares their experience of
building up an archive in San Cristobal de las Casas as a
transdisciplinary proposal called trans-archive. Contrasting the goals of
this innovative archival proposal with the structures and contents of
national archives in Mexico and Latin America, the author challenges the
conceptualization and stereotyping of black bodies within the framework of
capitalist and colonial narratives (p. 202).
The third and last section, “Epistemología y pedagogía de la memoria,”
deals with the construction of different spaces dedicated to the
reflection of memory and its critical approaches. The article by Windy M.
Cosme Rosario is an illustrative example due to its focus on narration and
representation within museum spaces. The author highlights the power of
feminism to transform memory studies in the region into “a space for the
Problematization of the narratives of ‘the unique history’, the
memorialist praxis of the nation-state in Chile, and the obsession with
white and masculine knowledge” (p. 392).
The three sections contribute insightfully to the reflection on
corporality and political practice, giving space for the consideration of
the collective dimension of memory. The book challenges the role of
nation-oriented narratives and expands the framework of memory studies
inviting researchers to incorporate a multilayered dimension of memory
that transcends debates about the past and rather, reemerges in everyday
life.
Finally, although the intended audience might be Latin American and
Caribbean activists and scholars, the volume will be of interest to a much
wider audience as it offers a broad approach to the subject from a
critical and transformative angle. It clearly fosters the question of how
memory is intertwined with the vindication of knowledge, the preservation
of the past, and its transformation into inclusive futures that
acknowledge the social margins and dissident individual and collective
experiences. The book grants such a rich perspective on contemporary
socio-political dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean that its
extrapolation to other contexts is not only possible but necessary.
German Abstract
Feministische
Spuren der Erinnerungsforschung in Lateinamerika und der Karibik
Das Buch Memoria y Feminismos: Cuerpos, sentipensares y
resistencias leistet einen Beitrag zu den Debatten über Erinnerung
in Lateinamerika und der Karibik. Es reflektiert Körperlichkeit und
politische Praktiken der Erinnerung. In einer Reihe von dreizehn Artikeln
werden die Postulate der Körperpolitik und der feministischen
Standpunkttheorie als theoretischer Rahmen verwendet. Der Band präsentiert
einen kritischen Ansatz und hinterfragt die Rolle der eurozentrischen
Wissenschaft, während er gleichzeitig Einblicke in die lokalisierte und
erfahrungsorientierte Forschung gibt.
Copyright 2024, TATIANA QUINTERO. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
