Social Science Research Council

"Family Narratives and National Reconstruction in Argentina and South Africa, 1993-2003"

My dissertation project explores the complex and dynamic relationships that develop between fictional narratives and official policies of social repair in the wake of state violence. Specifically, I analyze the multiple ways in which representations of two groups of children, children of those "disappeared" during Argentina's Dirty War and "coloured" children orphaned through the violence of the Apartheid state in South Africa, are being mobilized in the contemporary political and cultural spheres. Both groups of children have been figured in recent political discourse as metaphors for the "new" (post-Apartheid and post-dictatorship) nation; in fiction, theater and film, they have often been linked both to the possibility of historical knowledge and to the prospect of national reconstruction. Faced with this kind of social positioning, some of these children have responded by initiating their own form of cultural production. The narratives constructed by these children often link the task of reconstructing their own family history, in the form of a fictional genealogy, with the process of rewriting the larger national story. I argue that these family narratives--which generally work to deconstruct historically normalized conceptions of familial relationships--can be read to critique the processes of national reconstruction that have structured public discourse since Argentina and South Africa's return to democracy. Further, I suggest that the re-conceptualization of family that occurs in these texts points projects of national reconstruction in new directions.