Meatpackers, Peronists, and Collective Memory: A View from the South

Abstract

MEMORY, IT SEEMS, IS EVERYWHERE NOWADAYS. As both Alon Confino and Susan Crane remind us, we are in the midst of a boom in the academy, centered on the production of texts about memory, commemoration, and forgetting. The scope of this phenomenon has been impressive both in terms of the range of its subject matter and the extent of its disciplinary reach. Nor, of course, is the phenomenon limited to academic texts. The fin-de-siecle world of the North Atlantic has been increasingly characterized by what the cultural critic Andreas Huyssen has called "mnemonic convulsions" expressed in cultural artifacts and experiences ranging from "museummania" and monumental art to personal memoirs, TV mini-series, and the nostalgia-laden products of retro fashion.' At the very least, this convergence between the thematics of the academy and the wider popular culture should alert us to the fact that the issues at stake in any debate on memory go far beyond the limits of particular disciplinary polemics. Within the disciplinary confines of history, both Crane and Confino issue a salutary warning to historians who would invoke the notion of collective memory: be aware of the potential conceptual pitfalls inherent in its under-theorized use. I find Confino's methodological warnings about the need to contextualize memory studies in the broadest possible sense irreproachable (although I do not share his evaluation of all the texts he analyzes). We clearly need to avoid the functionalist reduction of the cultural to the political, to pay attention to issues of reception, and to be aware of the complex process by which different public discourses of memory are interpellated. It seems to me, too, that Confino's final call to historicize memory, to analyze its genealogy as a discursive category, is an important reminder to scholars tempted to invoke its use in overly simplistic ways by what he defines as the very "open-endedness of the notion." Crane's concerns are rather different: her examination of the epistemological status of collective memory raises a number of important issues regarding the relationship between collective and historical memory, the role of the remembering individual, and the nature of historical representation. Her attempt "to imagine a new form for historical consciousness"