‘I dreamt about it, just like this, exactly the way it is’: Haunting emotional geographies in Buenos Aires

Abstract

This article deepens feminist scholarship on emotional geographies of fear via an engagement with haunting and memorialization in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during and after the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. I take the recuperated Space for Memory Virrey Cevallos as a case study of emotional geographies of fear to assess how fear becomes temporally and spatially fixed in the landscape. I argue that recuperation and memorialization disrupt the haunting of this emotional geography of fear, and that attention to everyday experiences of fear nuances broader discourses on justice. I develop my analysis with testimonies from neighbors of Virrey Cevallos to follow the endurance of fear leading up to the site's recuperation as a national Space for Memory. Tracing a timeline of this geography from the dictatorship to the present shows the haunting effects of fear, and asks how memorialization, as a material and temporal intervention in emotional geographies of fear, addresses the (dis)continuities of this geography. This research shows that everyday emotional geographies of fear are intertwined with the (dis)continuities of time. Further, this case study suggests that disrupting haunting requires an intervention that bridges the legacies of the past with reparative justice that attends to place.