Event Details

The CWD Work in Progress Seminar is a forum for researchers at Lancaster to discuss their work. All are welcome to attend.

CWD Work in Progress Seminar: Dr Cornelia Gräbner (Languages and Cultures, SGA), Telling histories from within the Archive: ‘The other militaries’ in the Academic Center for the Memory of Our América

Tuesday 28th April

12.00-13.00

Room TBC

This work-in-progress paper explores a marginal and underrepresented topic, through the lens of material found in the archives of the Academic Center for the Memory of Our America (CAMeNA): those members of the armed forces in Latin America who, during the Cold War, took a principled stance in defence of democracy, or who involved themselves in resistant or revolutionary projects that sought to establish democracies. For many, this came at the price of their livelihoods, sometimes their freedom and often, their lives.

The paper tells their story starting with documents found in the archives of the CAMeNA among the working papers of Argentine journalist Gregorio Selser, himself exiled in Mexico after the military-led 1976 coup d’etat in Argentina. Near the end of his life Selser gathered material about ‘the other militaries.’ I build on this material and other documents held in the CAMeNA and expand the range, to introduce different strands of the democratically committed military traditions in Latin America: members of the armed forces taking state power through democratic elections and attempting to strengthen the democratic State, as in the case of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala); the opposition to coup d’etats, for example by the Chilean constitutionalists; the support of democratic revolutionary movements, like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and the approach through Human Rights promotion within the armed forces.

Feedback on whether the approach of telling the story of a marginal, but ethically exemplary group from within an archive engages an interested, non-Latin Americanist audience will be most welcomed.

Cornelia Gräbner is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature. She researches on poetry and politics, poetry-in-performance, and committed writing. Her recent publications include a special issue of Comparative Critical Studies on Dissent, Opposition and la parola contraria in Literature, Politics and the Arts (edited with Jim Hicks and Joost de Bloois), and a collaboration with Girasol Press on Inside / Desde la cárcel, a bilingual artists’ book of poems written by Argentine political prisoners during the 1976-1983 civic-military dictatorship. Among her forthcoming publications is a book chapter on the presence of Central America in the counterhegemonic poetics of U.S. poets Margaret Randall and Carolyn Forché.