Remembering in Twentieth Century Argentina: Contested Narratives of Military Rule, 1976-2021 - David M. K. Sheinin

Based on a broad range of archival work, oral histories, and other original research by the authors, this exciting new book explores the history of memory construction in Argentina over the long term. The book moves chronologically and thematically over the past century as both a study of memory making itself, and as a broad set of approaches to Argentina’s past through how people built memory over time. Chapters focus on memory narratives in the evolution of conservative and liberal thought, sport, film, alternative recollections of the revolutionary left, and the powerful legacy of the last dictatorship (1976-1983).

The book outlines four key arguments. There are varied forms of memory construction that have often led to severe divisions in how Argentines have remembered their pasts. As a result, and in part because of multiple severe political and economic crises over time, recent and distant pasts have remained close to Argentines in how they construct the present. The last military dictatorship (1976-1983) has proved a key twentieth-century memory fulcrum both for how the armed forces sought to build a new Argentina by way of specific memory dynamics and for how cultural, social, and political memories have since been deeply attached to military rule. Finally, Argentines have routinely broken social, cultural, and political boundaries in memory making.

The first to address long-term memory construction in Argentina, this book will find audiences among academics, students, and many others interested in Argentina, Latin America, memory studies, politics, dictatorship, film, sport, social and cultural history and more.