Holocaust Memory, Aesthetics and the Dictatorships of the Southern Cone of Latin America: Interconnecting Memories and Traumas

My dissertation examines how Holocaust tropes, figures, and icons have travelled across cultural landscapes and been adopted by Southern Cone writers and artists to reflect on the atrocities perpetrated during the dictatorships in Uruguay (1973-1985), Argentina (1976-1983), and Chile (1973-1990).Specifically, I focus on the literary trope of "filling in the void," the visual trope of the "presence of absence" and silhouette figure , and the icon of Anne Frank, as I analyze selected writings of Uruguayan Jewish writer Mauricio Rosencof, the memory-activist intervention created by Argentinian artists Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel, and selected poetry and children's literature of Chilean Jewish writer Marjorie Agosín, respectively.Through my analysis, I highlight the transformations of these Holocaust tropes, figures, and icons, and center on the multidirectional memories that a decentered reading of these texts and visual pieces offers relating to both of these traumatic histories.As I focus on these dialogical encounters of memory, I underscore how diverse mediums (literary fiction, poetry, photography, visual art, protest art, and textile art) provide access to different memories and interconnections between the Holocaust and the Southern Cone dictatorships.These case studies also highlight different personal, collective, cultural, and postmemories of both atrocities, and emphasize different victims, including prisoners, detaineddisappeared persons, gendered experiences, and those of witnesses (both direct and indirect ones).My research expands the fields of memory studies, Holocaust studies, and Latin American Jewish and memory studies.It examines Holocaust memory from a decentered perspective while highlighting the significance of Latin American literary and visual Marino iii representations of trauma.My work is guided by comparative and transcultural readings of the selected corpus and follows the theoretical framework of Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory and Astrid Erll's transcultural memory while incorporating Latin American and Southern Cone theorizations of memory such as those of Fernando Ortiz, Diana Taylor and Macarena Gómez-Barris.My interdisciplinary methodological and transcultural positionality brings into focus complementary Latin American perspectives alongside traditional (i.e., European / North American) interpretations and underscores transcultural intersections that otherwise would not be foregrounded in these fields.My research also prompts readers to consider the problematics of multidirectional memory.further contextualize the direct connections between "El Siluetazo" and Jerzy Skąpski's Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia. Marino 18Finally, postmemory is a concept developed by Marianne Hirsch, which she defines as "the relationship that the 'generation after' [the Holocaust] bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before" (5).These are "experiences […] [that] were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right" (5; emphasis in original).The term arose from Hirsch's own "autobiographical readings" of works by second-generation Holocaust writers and visual artists," as she saw that they shared "certain qualities and symptoms that make us a postgeneration" (4; emphasis in original).Postmemory is particularly significant for the case studies of Chapters One and Three, as the works of Jewish writers Rosencof and Agosín are imbued with their postmemories of the Holocaust and the intergenerational trauma inherited by their family's experience of this traumatic history.I reference Hirsch's theorization of this concept further in both Chapters One and Three. MethodologyMy methodological approach centers on analyzing, through a comparative and multidirectional lens, several case studies that adopt the selected Holocaust tropes, figures, and icons to speak about the Uruguayan, Argentinian, and Chilean dictatorships.The case study approach foregrounds how the "filling in the void" literary trope, the "presence of absence" visual trope and silhouette figure, and the iconic figure of Anne Frank are transformed as they are used by Uruguayan, Argentinian, and Chilean, writers, and artists.As part of my case studies, I examine the works of two Jewish authors, second and third-generation writers with close ties to the Holocaust (Mauricio Rosencof and Marjorie Agosín) as they respond to their experiences of the Uruguayan and Chilean Marino 19 military regimes, respectively.I also analyze the memory-activist intervention created by a group of non-Jewish artists who are influenced by a Christian Polish art piece to represent the victims of the Argentinian dictatorship.I focus on both Jewish and non-Jewish works to highlight how Holocaust memory, discourses, and aesthetic representations have been widely adapted and transformed in the Southern Cone dictatorial contexts as the dictatorships affected both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.8 I also discuss how the works are influenced by the socio-historical and cultural contexts surrounding their creation, and how these aspects affect the readers' understanding of the pieces from a contemporary perspective.In addition, I pay particular attention to the evolution of the Holocaust tropes, figures, and icons examined in each of the case studies as I focus on a more contemporary representation at the end of each chapter.This approach foregrounds the particular context of each work and considers the role of Holocaust aesthetic representations in the 1980s-2000s versus in the last decades, 2015present.For instance, the connections to Holocaust memory in Argentina and Chile during the 1980s (as I discuss in Chapter Two and Chapter Three) are quite distinct from those made in the Uruguayan context in the early 2000s and 2020s (evident in Chapter One), and in the Chilean context in the mid-2010s (Chapter Three).In addition, each chapter of my dissertation focuses on different mediums both in relation to the adopted Holocaust tropes, figures, and icons and the Latin American case studies examined.For example, Chapter One centers on the literary, photographic, and collage mediums; Chapter Two on visual art, and protest art, and its transformation in the political-activist context; and Chapter Three returns to the literary and photographic mediums and incorporates textile art transformed into visual imagery through literary Marino 20 illustrations.My focus on these diverse mediums foregrounds how each one of them provides different access to personal, intergenerational, and cultural memories of both the Holocaust and the Southern Cone dictatorships.For example, the visual art in Chapter Two underlines the intrinsic connection between memory and activism in the Southern Cone, while the different genres utilized by Rosencof and Agosín, in Chapters One and Three, highlight their role in providing different outlets for the writers to respond to the trauma they faced.The attentiveness to different mediums aligns with memory studies theorist Ann Rigney's understanding of the importance of analyzing representations of past atrocities.As she suggests: "Remembering the past, shaping the future remembrance of the present, and struggles for a better future feed into each other in ways that still need unpacking along with the distinctive cultural forms and practices that are used in the transmission of civic commitment" (372).The different mediums, as well as focus on both Jewish and non-Jewish works, underscores the need to begin to "unpack" these various transformations and the nuanced use of the Holocaust tropes, figures, and icons I examine in this dissertation.The multidirectional memory and transcultural approach (following both Erll's and Ortiz's understandings) I take are also influenced by my positionality as a Uruguayan Canadian scholar.Thus, my work complements the field of Latin American memory studies and provides a different perspective from Latin-American-focused readings.My Polish-Christian heritage also contributes to my interest in Holocaust memory and in the Polish artworks I examine in Chapter Two and the dialogical connections I emphasize in this case study.Moreover, my research contributes to the methodological shift occurring in Holocaust and memory studies, which focuses on decentered and decolonized Marino 21 representations of the Holocaust.This shift has entailed concentrating on research relating to Holocaust memories and narratives from the "periphery" instead of the "centre" such as Europe and North America.For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) held a workshop in 2021 titled "Decentering Holocaust Studies: Comparative Perspectives from the Global South," which focused on the histories of refugees and Holocaust survivors (Jewish and Roma) who emigrated to the Global South, including Latin America, Asia, and Africa.With the objective "to bring these histories into a wider scholarly frame in order to identify their commonalities and as well as the centrality of the margin" ("Decentering"), the scholars behind this workshop highlight the field's change of direction away from European and North American perspectives to the inclusion of more diverse experiences and histories relating to the Holocaust.This decentered perspective fuels my inclusion of each of the works in my dissertation, which are not foregrounded elsewhere, and places at the center the intersections between these diverse traumatic histories (the Southern Cone dictatorships and the Holocaust).Moreover, the shift in perspective in the field of Holocaust studies has also been accompanied by the emphasis on memory studies to go beyond the nation-state and focus on transcultural and transnational connections.As Aleida Assmann argues: "[The 'transnational turn'] fosters a rethinking and reconfiguring of national memories in the context of transnational connectedness" (

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