Resumen de The “Generation After” talks back: contestations of postmemory in recent latin american literature
In what follows, I offer a reading of three novels from across Latin America that present frontal challenges to postmemorial discourses, representational repertoires, and hijo subjectivities: Alejandro Zambra’s (Chile) Formas de volver a casa (2011); Verónica Geber-Bicecci’s (Mexico) Conjunto vacío (2015); and José Carlos Agüero’s (Peru) Persona (2018). Each of these works seeks to recognize alternative experiences of political violence—here, what Cecilia Sosa has termed “alternative zones of injury” (3)—as well as the disparate postmemorial inheritances produced in their wake. Breaking with accepted postmemorial discourses, all three authors call for the destabilization of parent-centered narratives, effectively multiplying the voices authorized to speak of the past and interpret its present reverberations. Zambra, Gerber Bicecci, and Agüero all suggest that Latin America’s many hijos must move beyond constricting generational frameworks, presenting their stories and experiences on their own terms. My reading of these texts thus dialogues with Sosa’s (2014) reflections on the Argentine context, particularly her diagnosis of a “queering” of acts of mourning within anti-hegemonic hijo works, and the rejection of a “bloodline assembly of victims” (1).5 This “queering,” as she describes, works to contest a hegemonic “biological normativity” (2) and its “bloodline hierarchy of suffering” (3), responding to “struggles of younger generations to build their own spaces in the present” (3).
