Understanding Military Discourse in Post-Dictatorial Uruguay. A Review of Mariana Achugar's <em>What We Remember: The Construction of Memory in Military Discourse</em> (Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2008)

Authors

  • Macarena Gómez-Barris University of Southern California

Keywords:

military discourse, memory, violence, Argentinian Dirty War

Abstract

Achugar’s 2008 book What We Remember: The Construction of Memory in Military Discourse is a potent study on the dynamic socio-semiotic aspects of memory through a detailed analysis of the military as an institution that produces multifaceted discourses about its central role in State violence. The book might well be compared to Feitlowitz’s brilliant monograph, A Lexicon of Terror (1998), which unpacked the manipulation of words, memories, and discourses in the Argentinean Dirty war, effectively illustrating how language was used to produce high degrees of confusion, fear, and tacit consensus in a populace. Published a decade after Feitlowitz’s work, Achugar’s book is much indebted to the lineage of memory studies that linguistically takes apart, through an analysis of semiotic patterns, what is remembered and narrated with respect to State violence.

Author Biography

Macarena Gómez-Barris, University of Southern California

Macarena Gómez-Barris es Profesora Asociada de Sociología y Estudios Americanos y Étnicos en la Universidad del Sur de California. Obtuvo su doctorado en Sociología en la Universidad de California, Santa Cruz. Es autora del libro Where Memory Dwells: Culture, Democracy, and the Afterlife of State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2009) y es co-editora, con Herman Gray, de Towards a Sociology of the Trace (en prensa, University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Su artículo “Two 9/11s in a Lifetime: Chilean Art, Terror and Displacement”, apareció en la revista Latino Studies, y tiene en prensa varios otros artículos.

Published

2010-09-01

How to Cite

Gómez-Barris, M. (2010). Understanding Military Discourse in Post-Dictatorial Uruguay. A Review of Mariana Achugar’s <em>What We Remember: The Construction of Memory in Military Discourse</em> (Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2008). A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 8(1), 463–467. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/510

Issue

Section

Reviews: Memory and Human Rights