The Media of Memories: Argentine and Brazilian Transitional Justice as Seen on TV

Abstract

Grounded in my own observation of the recent string of Latin American shows, such as Montecristo (Argentina, 2008) and Amor e revolução (Brazil, 2011), which directly confront traumatic national pasts, this project investigates what representative 21st century Argentine and Brazilian fictional and testimonial televisual accounts (telenovelas, miniseries and testimonial interviews) communicate about the role of television in the construction and mediation of the officially sanctioned memory narratives promoted by normative transitional justice mechanisms. In this vein, this project—The Media of Memories: Argentine and Transitional Justice as Seen on TV—poses a series of interrelated questions:1) How can transitional justice processes take place on the small screen? 2) How can understanding these televisual practices advance existing theories on transitional justice as it relates to the right to memory, and the protection of memory’s productive problematics—such as the respect for silence, gaps and hauntings inherent in remembering mass atrocities? And finally, 3) What alternative spaces for advocacy, if any, are opened up by these television programs? In the end, my project contends that television programs, in the Argentine and Brazilian cases, have the potential to operate as malleable discursive spaces that question hegemonic memory regimes and complicate normative truths put in place by the State. Furthermore, the telenovelas, miniseries, and testimonial interviews analyzed throughout this project function, to varying degrees, as dynamic memory mediums that simultaneously promote memory as memory entrepreneurs, profit from memory, frame what truths should be remembered, and digitally transmit memory. Thus, I maintain that moving televised images have the potential to operate as a widely accessible form of transitional justice that not only translates judicial arguments to the mass populace, but also provides alternative spaces for the re-definition of justice and the performance of multilayered activism. Through its visual depiction and fictionalization of the limit experiences of collective traumas, television stages those realities that resist verbal narration and operates as a form of symbolic reparations that restores dignity to victims, develops a more inclusive narrative of the past, and protects the right to memory.