Congreso LASA 2015

28 de mayo, 12:00pm, Caribe Hilton – Flamingo B

Chair: Andreia Lisboa de Sousa, University of Texas/Austin

Discussant: Leonardo Gala Echemendía, Escritor / Yasmín S. Portales Machado, GT AC&SE de CLACSO

Papers:

1- Estrategias de la violencia jurídica neoliberal en la narrativa reciente de Chile, México y Brasil

Danilo Santos Lopez, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile & Ingrid Urgelles Latorre, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

2 – Prolongation of Violence and Unquiet Silences in Contemporary Guatemalan Fiction

Roy W. Ketchum, College of Saint Benedict | Saint John’s University

3 – Terror as Life on Death Row: The Poetics of Óscar Hahn

Vanessa M. Ovalle, University of Southern California

What constitutes a state sanctioned killing?  The poet Óscar Hahn explores this question through the lens of a survivor of state terror and political violence during the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile.  As someone who was detained and then set free, he is keenly aware of those who were not so lucky, the desaparecidos who perished at the hands of the state.  Although most of the killings in Chile were not mandated by a judge as a result of a formal trial, they were still handed down by a state apparatus, one that is unique because of its violent imposition and questionable attempts to adhere to the letter of law.  Thus, the situation of these desaparecidos does not fit neatly under the category of a wartime killing, but is not a state sanctioned killing, by death penalty, in the more normative sense of the term.  The situation of terror that Hahn explores in his poetry occupies a space in-between: a reality in which every citizen waits in a state of liminal, undeclared, death row.  Hahn expands upon this reality in his well-known poem entitled “Pena de muerte” in which he describes living as a “sonámbulo sin saber si estás vivo o muerto” (sleepwalker without knowing whether you are alive or dead).  At stake in Hahn’s literary work is the possibility of testing the limits of a death penalty discourse, especially when one considers the question: to what ends can any killing be sanctioned reasonably by law?

4 – Whose Memorial Sites? Negotiating the Past in Leopoldo Brizuela’s Una misma noche

Michelle E Hulme-Lippert, Emory University

In the past decade in Argentina, the pursuit of memory, truth, and justice for the thousands of leftist militants disappeared during the country’s most recent military dictatorship (from 1976 to 1983) has been central to the politics of presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. These human rights politics have recuperated and extended the transitional justice politics begun under President Raúl Alfonsín in the 1980s during the country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, which were later halted by amnesty laws that protected military subordinates acting under their superiors’ orders and prohibited future investigations, eventually being overturned altogether by President Carlos Menem’s infamous pardoning of six arrested senior military officers. In the present, during the Kirchners’ administrations, those amnesty laws have been annulled, over 500 individuals have been convicted for their roles in dictatorial violence, key alliances have been formed between the presidents and two of Argentina’s most widely-known human rights organizations–the Madres and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo–, and many of the country’s former detention and torture centers have been transformed into memorial sites.