“It would have been your birthday today”: reminders in newspapers, tactics of affect and memory in the postdictatorhip public sphere

Abstract

After the fall of the last argentine dictatorship, collective memory of state terrorism has played an important role in the discussions in the public sphere. Publication of announcements reminding of those detained-disappeared by state terrorism is part of this conflict. We study this practice analyzing a special case: the announcements published in the Buenos Aires newspaper Pagina 12 between 1988 and 2013. With a corpus of 120 announcements, broaden by interviews to the participants, we analyze their discourse and performative strategies and propose hypotheses on their functions, affective, social, and political effects, and the way in which these tactics relate to other activisms of memory. These announcements honor, ask information, and testify to the life of the disappeared, operating on the social trauma of state terrorism. They socialize a quest for justice and materialize a political will for a shared project of society.