Introduction

In the Introduction chapter, the author introduces the book’s overarching theoretical contribution: the theory of “memory mapping.” The development of memory mapping is anchored in analysis of Guatemalan photographer Daniel Hernández-Salazar’s set of photographs Esclarecimiento, and more broadly situated within a review of scholarship on visuality, performance, affect, and memory. The chapter also offers an overview of the following chapters, their case studies, and the theoretical questions that guide them.

The Politics of Seeing: Affect, Forensics, and Visuality in the US-Mexico Borderlands

This chapter focuses on Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013), a hybrid documentary-fiction film that combines forensic attempts to identify a body found in the southern Arizona desert with the fictional retracing of his steps along the migrant trail, running through Central America up to the deadly stretch of desert known as the “corridor of death,” where his body is ultimately found. The author examines the film alongside a range of other contemporary visual and new media texts, including the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab’s 2010 “Transborder Immigrant Tool” and John Craig Freeman’s 2012 “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos.” Within the context of visual economies that simultaneously promote both the radical invisibility and hypervisibility of undocumented border crossers (both alive and deceased), this chapter investigates how visual memory mapping projects work to redirect the gaze toward new ways of seeing and feeling. In so doing, I argue, memory mapping functions as a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.

Conclusion

In this section, the author offers a brief recap and conclusion of the book.

Performing Archives, Performing Ruins

This chapter focuses on performance and photography, juxtaposed with a series of official memory sites. The primary case study is Argentine photographer Julio Pantoja’s hybrid photography performance, Tucumán Me Mata (Tucumán Kills Me, 2014), which performatively situates visual documentation of the 2013 Tucumán trials (for crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship) in their historical and spatial continuity. This visual performance is analyzed alongside three other Argentine memory projects: ESMA (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada) and the Parque de la Memoria, both in Buenos Aires, and the Museo de la Memoria in Rosario, Argentina. Studied side by side, these memory projects provide a lens through which to investigate the affective, performative power of visuality in relation to place and human rights and memory in Argentina.

The Materiality of Memory: Touching, Seeing, and Feeling the Past

Chapter Two focuses on the relationship between visuality, affect, memory, and place within the context of temporality, materiality, and performative reenactment. The chapter is grounded in an investigation of the relationship between memory and materiality, and asks how material matter can be strategically employed in the service of political historiographies; and how bodies, by way of reenactment, can function as a strategic component of exhuming and mapping memory onto place. It focuses on two documentaries, both by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán: Chile, la Memoria Obstinada (Chile, Obstinate Memory, 1997) and Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light, 2010). If official histories, by definition, sublimate and attempt to make transgressive memories disappear, then it is essential to investigate the ways in which memory persists in bodies and lived experience, and in the mnemonic potency of physical objects and spaces. Through meticulous memory mapping, Guzmán’s films illustrate the immense historiographical value in bringing bodies, materiality (including bones, objects, images, and physical sites), and official histories into contact and dialogue with one another.

Affect, Haunting, and Memory Mapping

In this chapter, the author more fully develops the theoretical contours of memory mapping. Grounded in study of the Salvadoran documentary El Lugar Más Pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011), the author investigates connections between: performative visuality as a means of transmitting embodied knowledge and place-making; haunting, memory, testimony, and affect. This chapter is guided by the following: How do we render visually and affectively knowable the ongoing negotiations of living among the ruins of history? What is the relationship between memory and affect? How might the lens of memory mapping offer new perceptions and understandings of the post-conflict period?