Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Memory's Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3824380

1527-1900

Victoria Langland,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

Rebecca Atencio's Memory's Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil is a deceptively slender volume that carries a hefty analytical weight. The book's context is the relatively slow and circuitous route that Brazil has taken in its efforts to come to terms with the legacies of the military dictatorship of 1964–1985. After the return to civilian rule in 1985 it took over a decade for the federal government to acknowledge state accountability for past human rights violations, and over a quarter century passed before it founded a national truth commission to investigate this period. Yet, as Atencio demonstrates, these years were nonetheless marked by periodic moments of intense public debates about the meanings of the past. These oftentimes occurred when institutional mechanisms to reckon with the dictatorial period, such as official investigations, legislation, or state efforts to repurpose former torture centers, coincided with the release of cultural works that similarly responded to the dictatorship, such as novels, films, or television shows. In the ensuing public discussions and understandings, the institutional mechanisms and cultural productions intertwined, and it is the resulting interplay between them that forms the heart of this book.The central argument of Memory's Turn is that Brazil has experienced recurring “cycles of cultural memory.” These cycles begin when works of cultural production about the dictatorship and institutional mechanisms to address aspects of the dictatorial past have, by chance or by design, emerged at the same time. In certain exceptional cases, that synchronicity has led to an “imaginary linkage” of the two, whereby people associate them with one another (p. 6). Various social actors and organizations then take advantage of this seeming connection to advocate for particular perspectives, resulting in a round of discussion, debate, and analysis about the past that both magnifies and prolongs the impact of the cultural production and of the institutional mechanism. Finally, the process leads to new creative expressions of cultural memory work that may spark a new turn in the cycle. Each cycle builds upon the others, making them really one long, cumulative, rich process of meaning making and memory construction.The book compellingly and artfully demonstrates this process by tracing four cycles of cultural memory, or four historical junctures in which the temporal simultaneity of a given cultural production and an institutional mechanism gave rise to dynamic national discussions about the recent past. The first is the period around 1979, when the Amnesty Law of that year became linked with the published testimonies of two participants in the armed struggle, Fernando Gabeira and Alfredo Sirkis. The second cycle examined occurred in 1992, when popular protests in favor of impeaching then-president Fernando Collor de Mello coincided with the airing of the first television miniseries to portray the dictatorship in a relatively critical light, Anos rebeldes. The early 2000s is the focus of the third cycle, when Fernando Bonassi's novel of 2003, Prova contrária, presented the fate of a disappeared man as maddeningly impossible to ascertain. In the years just before and after the novel's release, the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances was investigating actual cases of the disappeared and preparing an official report designed to satisfy the “right to truth” (if not to justice) (p. 86). The final cycle of cultural memory examined here spans the period from 1999 to 2007 and focuses on the relationship between a play held at a prison and torture center under the dictatorship, the headquarters of São Paulo's political police (Departamento de Ordem Política e Social [DOPS]), and the state government's various efforts to transform the site into, first, a sanitized cultural center and, later, a memorial to former prisoners. The four examples showcase not just the diversity of the kinds of institutional and cultural responses to the dictatorship but also the fascinating ways in which people have linked them and made sense of them together. As Atencio argues in the book's conclusion, these interactions result in each response (the institutional and the cultural) having a longer and wider impact than they might otherwise have had. Moreover, they help determine whether the institutional mechanism leads to the end of memory work or inspires new efforts to reckon with the past.In the already very rich field of studies of memory and transitional justice, Memory's Turn offers a critically important addition and should become required reading for anyone working in this or related fields. It demonstrates how cultural works operate alongside official mechanisms as nations grapple with past violence and how societies bring both culture and policy to bear in their own reckonings with the past.