Memory, Truth, and Justice in Contemporary Latin America

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This powerful text provides the first systematic analysis of the second wave of memory and justice mobilization throughout Latin America. Pairing clear explanations of concepts and debates with case studies, the book offers a unique opportunity for students to interpret the history and politics of Latin American countries. The contributors provide insight into human rights issues and grassroots movements that are essential for a broader understanding of struggles for justice, memory, and equality across the globe, especially during our current unsettled times of political polarization, violence, repression, and popular resistance worldwide.

Reviews

This volume analyzes memory, truth, and justice struggles in Latin America, and their achievements and limitations, in what editor Roberta Villaln terms the second wave of such mobilizations. It also aims to offer activist scholarship to contribute to changing the conditions that perpetuate injustice and impunity. The book poses some key issues across a range of countries. . . . The volume raises provocative questions and adds to our understanding of diverse responses to impunity in Latin America. * The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History *
An invaluable contribution to our understanding of the ways memory intersects with the political search for justice. By attending not only to institutional practices but also to vernacular rhetorics, the case studies in this volume expand our understanding of the kind of memory work necessary to seek a just and sustainable resolution to conflict. The contributors to this volume provide detailed and compelling studies of memory practices in various countries within Latin America. Taken together, the collected essays open up a dialogue that will be useful for students of the region but also for any who are interested in the way public memory is involved in efforts toward achieving social justice. -- Kendall R. Phillips, Syracuse University
This invaluable text offers a nuanced and multifaceted view of the second wave of memory politics in Latin America.Spanning the varied yet aligned contexts from Argentina to Chile and Guatemala to Uruguay, among others, the book is an enormously useful introduction to the contradictory, complex, and intersecting mobilizations of memory, human rights, reconciliation, and social justice that have defined Latin Americas relationship to its history of violence and state terror. -- Marita Sturken, New York University
Organized in four parts, and with the participation of leading scholars in the field, this interdisciplinary book focuses on different approaches to framing and reframing collective memory and the paradoxes of memory and justice. . . Villaln underscores new ways to reframe memories of the past to promote truth, memory, and justice. . . Without disconnecting trauma from transitional justice, the contributions of Lorenzo DOrsi, Virginia Garrard, and Susana Kaiser point to silence and traumatic memory, as well as to the truth and justice process[.] -- Ana Forcinito, Latin American Research Review

Author Bio

Roberta Villaln is a Fulbright scholar, associate professor of sociology, and the chairperson of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at St. Johns University, New York City.