Dictatorship, Memory, and Violence 60 years after the Coup: A Historiographical Review and an Analytical Proposal

Abstract

The article proposes a historiographical assessment of the literature on military dictatorship, focusing on the links between memory and violence. Looking at the changes in the academic literature that took place 40 and 50 years after the coup, I try to outline the consolidation of three historiographical lineages: the one that treats memory as myth, the one that analyses memory disputes, and the one that seeks to include marginalized subjects and social groups. Despite their important differences, I argue that they are all marked by the prevalence of a watertight notion of political violence, which limits the analytical scope of the work. On the 60th anniversary of the coup, I argue that a historiographical movement aimed at blurring the boundaries between the categories of political violence and ordinary violence can broaden the scope and depth of research that seeks to understand the violence of the dictatorial state.