Locating Transnational Memory

Abstract

This special issue demonstrates the strengths of a located approach to transnational memory. The issue focuses intensively on Argentina and Spain, but also makes forays into Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, among other locations. By ‘located’ I do not mean simply ‘local’ – indeed, negotiating the question of the local and its relation to the global is high on the agenda of this special issue. A located approach to transnational memory might take inspiration from the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich’s concept of a ‘politics of location’.1A politics of location does indeed pay rigorous attention to the local – starting from the intimate terrain of the body – but it situates such attention in relation to other scales: from the regional to the national to the global. While Rich’s essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ does not address the question of memory directly, her famous assertion that ‘a place on the map is also a place in history’ resonates with the stakes of the essays collected here – essays that deal, as does Rich’s ‘Notes’, with the contradictory and intersecting legacies of state-sponsored violence (Ref. 1, p. 212).