Archives

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  Pedestales Vacíos. Memorias disidentes: monumentos intervenidos, iconoclasias y disputas por lo público en América Latina

  Vol. 1 No. 2 (2024)

  Many Latin American nations, as a foundational genesis, sculpted in bronze some of their egregious horrors: conquerors, encomenderos, slave traders, genocides, army leaders who massacred entire populations, and a foreseeable etcetera. If it is true that, as Ernest Renan says, nations are less what they remember than what they are forced to forget, we could ask ourselves what is the role of monumentalization and the invention of public memory and national heritages in this founding oblivion. The wave of intervention, impugnation, and demolition, as the case may be, of monuments generally dedicated to male heroes, has become generalized in recent years in the continent and the world. How can we read this iconoclastic will? How can we approach it, taking into account the political impulse that drives it? Could we think of the iconoclasm behind the intervention and the toppling of recent statues and monuments not only as the impugnation of a proper name, a historical subject, a genocide or a slave trader, but also as the overthrow of that sovereign gesture, of a relationship with authority, the relationship of recognition to who narrates, who fixes, who names? Indigenous collectives, feminist collectives, organized women's groups against patriarchal violence, political groups fighting for the recovery of land, but also individual citizens, passers-by who join a collective call, participate in the iconoclastic actions. At the same time, institutionalized voices speak of the need to avoid "heritage damage", insist on "the preservation of identity signs" -even when, as most of the media reports during the 8M marches in Mexico City showed, the vast majority of the population that was in the streets "defending the monuments" did not know who was represented in the monuments or what place in history they had. This is not necessarily a "failure" of power, perhaps the opposite. But the question emerges on this point: what happens to a society that is called upon to "preserve" that about which it lacks a narrative, or whose narrative no longer corresponds to meaning, to experience, to the "truth effect"?

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  Ancestors, Bodies-Territories, and Memories. Debates and reflections on restitution, repatriation, return, and reburial of ancestors

  Vol. 2 No. 4 (2025)

  In this issue of the Memorias Disidentes Journal, we address the processes of repatriation, restitution, return, and/or reburial of ancestors to their territories of origin, to promote reflection and debate based on experiences developed in different contexts and situations. We also propose to complexify perspectives and approaches to key concepts such as: bodies/bodies-territories, repatriation, restitution, reburial, redignification, depatrimonialization, and other associated concepts. For several decades, different processes of returning and reburial of ancestors to their resting places have been generated worldwide, in response to demands promoted by various Indigenous movements and activism. In South America in particular, this issue has developed unevenly across countries, apparently motivated by the predominance, in some contexts, of persistent colonial relations that inhibit and render invisible Indigenous agencies and rights enshrined in international standards. However, in recent decades, this issue has begun to gain momentum in some countries in the region, while in others it has deepened, becoming central to some ethnopolitical agencies of various Indigenous Peoples. In this context, with this dossier, we hope to broaden the scope of this topic by providing new examples and discussing the interplay of other variables that intersect in the development of repatriation, restitution, return, and/or reburial of ancestors.

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  Feminisms and Extractivisms Dossier. Release Number

  Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023)

  Considering the contemporary imbrications around feminisms and extractivisms, this dossier initiated by the magazine Memorias Disidentes (Dissidient Memories) proposes to delve into the different uses, dimensions and understandings of both concepts within the framework of the struggles of the last two decades of the 21st century in the south of Abya Yala. We consider that extractivism and neo-extractivism are not only reduced to the presence of extractivist projects such as large-scale mining or the exploitation of hydrocarbons, among others, recognizing the need to specify the South American criticism that these concepts propose in their intimate connection with the movements social. From an anti-extractivist feminist proposition we affirm that extractivisms also constitute ontological colonizations that make possible processes of dispossession and violence intrinsic to the multiple contemporary dynamics in which modern-Western patriarchy-capitalism-neocolonialism is reproduced. Following this spirit, in this issue we call on different contributions from feminist, diasporic and queer authors, academic activists, indigenous and territorial defenders, members of indigenous communities and organizations, migrant feminist collectives and networks, ecofeminists and anti-extractivist, who share valuable theoretical reflections and experiences of fighting underway.

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  Elusive Archives, Dissident Bodies, Elusive Patrimonies and Devastated Territories

  Vol. 2 No. 3 (2025)

  In this third issue of Memorias Disidentes we reaffirm the importance of this university and transnational publishing project, produced by the hard work and against the current of unstable spirits and precarious times we live in. The issue presents an academic section with articles with a varied thematic range that goes from critical studies of the archive, the collective memories of dissident political bodies, reflections on the policies of conservation of cult images and monuments intervened by social movements, and rereadings of the discourses of power on indigenous ethnicities and writings of war in classic texts revisited from critical perspectives that attempt to locate the works of othering to make the narratives more complex. The Instituting Languages ​​section  ̶ our distinctive insignia in this dissident project ̶  offers four individual and collective collaborations that express in other keys (through the images of photography, dance, poetry and activist research) collective and community creativity to explore underlying themes, such as: intentional forest fires, the revival of racist colonialisms in indigenous territories and their poetic reflection from a Mapuche perspective, the neo-extractivist advance of large-scale mining in indigenous territories in Argentina, and the collective creation of dissident archives for the Brazilian LGBTQIAPN+ movement. Finally, this issue is completed with the Reviews Section where we share four reviews of valuable titles that strongly contribute to the central themes of interest in this magazine.