Proceedings of the 6th Arts & Humanities Virtual Conference, Prague

ALICIA PARTNOY AND THE LITERARY PROJECT OF TRANSCONTEXTUAL MEMORY MAKING

DEANNA H. MIHALY

Abstract:

Alicia Partnoy reconfigures the experience of trauma, as a disappeared Jewish woman detainee during the Dirty War in Argentina, into an alternative heroic survivor narrative, titled The Little School (1986). The author recently published ¡Escuchá!: Cuentos y versitos para los más chiquitos (2016) letters and poems she had sent her daughter from prison, returning again to the time of her capture and invoking personal memories in the service of a decades-long commitment to international memory-making. In her writing, Partnoy’s struggles are set against a backdrop of surging neo-Fascism ideology, interpreted by historian Federico Finchelstein as a transcontextualization of Holocaust practices on the South American continent manifested in the atrocities committed during the Dirty War. Partnoy’s work indicates the repressive violence of her captivity, and she refers to symbolic acts of anti-Semitism directed at her and other disappeared people as victims, yet the focus of her narrative is instead a tale of resistance and survival. This study identifies in Partnoy’s work a transcontextual literary rendering of the experience of trauma.

Keywords: Dirty War, The Little School, Alicia Partnoy, Federico Finchelstein, transcontextual, trauma

DOI: 10.20472/AHC.2020.006.002

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