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Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil by Rebecca J. Atencio

2015; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hpn.2015.0030

2153-6414

Margo Milleret,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

Reviewed by: Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil by Rebecca J. Atencio Margo Milleret Atencio, Rebecca J. Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. Pp. 170. ISBN 978-0-29929-724-4. Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil introduces an innovative way to think about the Brazilian dictatorship and the country’s slow move toward addressing the human rights violations that occurred during its overly long period of military control from 1964–85. The introduction provides the reader with a compact history of the dictatorship and introduces the theoretical framework, “cycles of cultural memory,” that will be illustrated in four case studies presented in historical order in the four chapters. The conclusion makes three interrelated statements about the benefits of utilizing this approach to understand postconflict societies. The framework “cycles of cultural memory” can best be understood by the key words the author uses to explain the relationship between cultural products, such as novels, soap operas, plays and films, and actions generated by Brazil’s political institutions, most of which were directly involved in the country’s intermittent efforts to address the abuses of its most recent dictatorship. The argument proposes that studying cultural products in relationship to political events produces greater insights and understanding since the two elements engage with each other in both productive and counterproductive ways. The key steps in the cycle that build these relationships are simultaneous emergence, imaginary linking, leveraging, and propagation. Two other concepts utilized skillfully in the study to characterize actions by those engaged in the work of confronting human rights abuses are closure, that is, intentions to bring an end to the process, and wedge, intentions to open up the process further. These terms are attributed to Steve J. Stern’s book Reckoning with Pinochet (Duke UP, 2010). The four steps in the “cycle of cultural memory” developed in Chapter 1 involve the Amnesty Law (1979) and the simultaneous publications of guerilla testimonials that reported on student revolutionary actions some ten years earlier in the dictatorship. Surprisingly, the two events become linked in a message of forgiveness and forgetting that forestalls any real effort to bring torturers to trial or respond to the removal of citizenship rights. However, the popularity of the testimonials helped launch or leverage the political careers of Fernando Gabeira and Alfredo Sirkis. The new initiatives or propagation of this connection between the Amnesty Law and the [End Page 356] novels led the authors to participate in the formation of the Green Party when Brazil returned to democracy in 1985. In contrast, the fate and the work of another dissident, Renato Tapajós, failed to gain traction for the novel he published in 1977. The remaining chapters also pair what seem to be unlikely cultural and political events that follow the steps in the “cycle of cultural memory.” Chapter 2 addresses the TV Globo miniseries “Anos rebeldes” (1992) which was based on the testimonial of Alfredo Sirkis from Chapter 1, and the impeachment of the first democratically elected president after the dictatorship, Fernando Collor de Mello. Chapter 3 discusses the Law of the Disappeared and Fernando Bonassi’s Prova contrária (2003), and Chapter 4 follows the fate of the torture center in the city of São Paulo and the play Lembrar é resistir which was staged there. In each of these chapters there is a tension between the manner in which the events are linked, the contributions that the linkage generates, and the ways in which this unusual pairing does or does not promote Brazil’s move toward righting the wrongs of the past. In the analysis of the two events, the author is careful to employ both existing criticism of the separate events and a close reading of the interplay between them. The idea of a cycle suggests that there is still unfinished business in Brazil’s process of realizing transitional justice. In fact, the conclusion points to yet another possible cycle with the pairing of the work of the National Truth Commission (2012) and the movie Hoje by Tata Amaral, which is based on the novel by Bonassi from Chapter 3. The author asks if...