The Argentine landscape is marked by countless sites of remembrance of the 1976-1983 dictatorship drawn by human rights groups in Argentina, producing a seemingly infinite command to remember the violence of this period and the 30,000 who were disappeared. Though this landscape can seem chaotic, this impression discounts the context of loss on which it is constructed as well as the deeply affective and contested political issues that motivate its construction. This study thus maps the ways demands for human rights mobilized through public remembrance of the dictatorship articulate a continual learning to live with loss. Investigating the specificities of loss in Argentina, I explore how human rights claims are made in the name of the disappeared who, neither dead nor alive, are at once everywhere and nowhere. I draw largely from my conversations with members of human rights groups to illuminate how the demand for derechos humanos is articulated in particular ways to address present-day social injustices and to affirm the living’s relationship with the disappeared. The study aims to contribute to an understanding of public remembrance as a continual process of teaching and learning about the past that is intended to motivate the formation of a public committed to constructing a better present and future.

The Argentine landscape is marked by countless sites of remembrance of the 1976-1983 dictatorship drawn by human rights groups in Argentina, producing a seemingly infinite command to remember the violence of this period and the 30,000 who were disappeared. Though this landscape can seem chaotic, this impression discounts the context of loss on which it is constructed as well as the deeply affective and contested political issues that motivate its construction. This study thus maps the ways demands for human rights mobilized through public remembrance of the dictatorship articulate a continual learning to live with loss. Investigating the specificities of loss in Argentina, I explore how human rights claims are made in the name of the disappeared who, neither dead nor alive, are at once everywhere and nowhere. I draw largely from my conversations with members of human rights groups to illuminate how the demand for derechos humanos is articulated in particular ways to address present-day social injustices and to affirm the living’s relationship with the disappeared. The study aims to contribute to an understanding of public remembrance as a continual process of teaching and learning about the past that is intended to motivate the formation of a public committed to constructing a better present and future.

<p>This study considers the pedagogical significance of mourning and remembrance in the context of the commemorative culture surrounding the “9/11” attacks on America, which have stimulated recent explorations of what it might mean to commit to ethical remembrances of the dead. Critical of “9/11” memorial discourses that provide justifications for heightened “homeland” security and military mobilization in the “War on Terror,” this project not only addresses the educative force of memorial-artistic responses in creating meaning out of mass deaths, but also dissociates the concept of the public memorial as foremost an apparatus of the state, private corporations, and other institutions which seek to use memorials towards amnesiac or ideological objectives. Analyses of the memorial responses addressed in this project unpack how particular modes of remembering “9/11” and its victims are themselves reflections upon the meanings and objectives of collective remembrance. The project first explores the “September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows” organization and how it negotiates the ways public sentiment is mobilized “in the name of” victims and their families. Through an analysis of Art Spiegelman’s <em>In the Shadow of No Towers</em>,<em> </em>I examine the capacity of graphic narrative to bear witness to traumatic events and speak to their legacies in non-hegemonic ways. Lastly, the project explores how Samira Makhmalbaf’s film <em>God, Construction and Destruction</em> calls for the re-evaluation of strategic memorial practices that risk reducing “9/11” remembrance pedagogies to universalizing modes of remembrance that further subjugate already marginalized communities. Stimulated by such memorial responses that interrogate conventional practices and assumptions of collective remembrance, the project argues that the public remembrance of “9/11” is a crisis of and for education: that is, an important occasion to seek and call for modes of remembrance and sites of pedagogies that foster an openness to the critical and transformative force of historical trauma.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)