Playful Memories

This volume examines the blending of fact and fiction in a series of cultural artefacts by post-dictatorship writers and artists in Argentina, many of them children of disappeared or persecuted parents. Jordana Blejmar argues that these works, which emerged after the turn of the millennium, pay testament to a new cultural formation of memory characterised by the use of autofiction and playful aesthetics. She focuses on a range of practitioners, including Laura Alcoba, Lola Arias, Félix Bruzzone, Albertina Carri, María Giuffra, Victoria Grigera Dupuy, Mariana Eva Perez, Lucila Quieto, and Ernesto Semán, who look towards each other's works across boundaries of genre and register as part of the way they address the legacies of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Approaching these works not as second-hand or adoptive memories but as memories in their own right, Blejmar invites us to recognise the subversive power of self-figuration, play and humour when dealing with trauma.

Jordana Blejmar is Research Associate in the School of the Arts, University of Liverpool, UK. Originally a literature graduate from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, she studied for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is a member of the steering committee of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and has curated art exhibitions in Liverpool, Paris and Buenos Aires. Her research interests include photography and memory, the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, toy and game art, and the material culture of childhood in Latin America, particularly in Argentina.