Memory's turn : reckoning with dictatorship in Brazil /

This remarkable study explains the peculiar turns that memory has taken in Brazil through the complicated interaction of cultural and state mechanisms created to redress human rights violations under Brazil's dictatorship (1964-85). Atencio (Tulane Univ.) includes both institutional mechanisms (commissions, reports, public memorials) and creative works (literature, film, theater), along with personal testimonies in order to comprehend the many turns that the process of remembering takes. To illustrate, she uses a "cycles of cultural memory" framework to juxtapose cultural and institutional products in four dynamic phases: the simultaneous emergence of a work and an institutional mechanism, e.g., the popular film Hoje (Today) about the reappearance of a woman's disappeared husband, and the creation of the Comissão Nacional da Verdade/National Truth Commission; the imagined joining of the two events in the popular mind; the leveraging of the popular connection by different groups for their own agendas; and the creation of new ways to express memory, such as memorial sites. Atencio's revelation of cultural and political synergies highlights the ambiguities inherent in recovering truths from the past, for memory and truth are not always the same thing. However, in Brazil, unlike Argentina and Chile, these have interacted to produce the commitment to nuncamais/never again, but not to accountability for perpetrators. --Denis Lynn Heyck, Loyola University Chicago