About the Book
Debates about how to remember politically contested or painful pasts exist throughout the world. As with the case of the Holocaust in Europe and Apartheid in South Africa, South American countries are struggling with the legacy of state terrorism left by the 1970s dictatorships. Coming to terms with the past entails understanding the role different social actors played in those events as well as what those event mean for us today. Young people in these situations have to learn about painful historical events over which there is no national consensus.
This book explores discursive processes of intergenerational transmission of recent history through the case of the Uruguayan dictatorship. The main themes of the book are the discursive construction of social memory and intergenerational transmission of contested pasts through recontextualization, resemiotization and intertextuality.
Table of Contents:
1. Intergenerational Transmission, Discourse, and the Recent History
2. Narratives as Transmission Tools: Learning about the Dictatorship in Uruguay
3. Family Conversations about the Dictatorship: Appropriating Anecdotes and Taking an Affective Stance
4. Arguments with Peers: Negotiating the Past in the Present
5. Conversations in the History Classroom: Pedagogical Practices in the Transmission of the Recent Past
6. Transmission Processes in Popular Culture: Recontextualization and Resemiotization in Music
7. Appropriating the Recent Past: Meaning Making Processes through Time
About the Author :
Mariana Achugar is a Guggenheim Fellow. She works as Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Her research explores cultural reproduction and change from a critical discourse analysis perspective. Among her publications is What we remember: the construction of memory in military discourse (2008).
Review :
Review 1 - John Flowerdew, Hong Kong City University 1) In your own words, please provide a short outline of the project The book focusses on how young people learn about a country's traumatic past, when they themselves did not experience it. The focus is on Uruguay, but the situation applies to many other states and territories, e.g. Vietnam, South Africa, to mention just two countries. The theoretical focus is on the discursive construction of social memory, a theme which has received considerable interest in Critical Discourse Analysis by e.g. Fairclough, Flowerdew and Wodak. The book also builds on the author's very well received previous monograph, What we remember: The construction of memory in military discourse (2008) in the prestigious John Benjamins DAPSAC Series. The main research questions are: how do young people learn about recent history? What representations are passed on and what is the role of discourse in this process? How are discourses about the past reproduced or transformed? The research method is ethnographic, the author following 20 young people over a two year period to see how they discursively reconstruct the period of the Uruguayan dictatorship. 2) Of the different product categories outlined above, which do you feel this proposal best fits and why? It is in between monograph and upper level text. While the book is definitely academic and of appeal to scholars and researchers, it may also find a market at undergraduate level, especially among students of Hispanic Studies. Proposal 3) Does this proposal offer a useful and/or original contribution to the field? Is it addressing any new/emerging areas? Yes the approach is original and the proposal marks out new ground. 4) Does it adequately engage with recent scholarship? Does it take existing scholarship forward? The proposal reviews previous related scholarship, although, unfortunately, a reference list is not included (unless I missed it). 5) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal? You may wish to consider structure, organisation, coherence and presentation of material; scope, coverage and breadth of appeal or degree of specialisation; whether there are any obvious omissions; timeliness and likely shelf-life of the research; what proportion of the work, if any, will require substantial re-working? Are any suggested improvements fundamental to the project's success or discretionary matters which might be addressed after the project has been accepted? The chapter by chapter synopsis is thorough and coherent, demonstrating that each chapter has a different focus on the issue at hand. The volume will be coherent and comprehensive. 6) Do you feel the author/editor is suitably qualified to produce a high quality book on this topic? Based on her previous book and her other publications, yes. With my co-editor John Richardson, I recently invited her to write a chapter for a forthcoming handbook on CDA, so I have confidence in her. 7) If you are aware that the book is being considered for inclusion in a specific series, please comment on its suitability for that series. n.a. Market and Competition 8) Who would you anticipate the main readership of this book to be (in terms of field and level)? Mostly MA students, but also undergraduates in history, international relations and Latin American studies. 9) Would this title be suitable for the student market as a core text? If so, would you adopt/recommend this book for any courses you teach? n.a. 10) Is this book likely to have interdisciplinary and/or international appeal? Yes, e.g Hispanic Studies, critical discourse analysis, psychology, education, and history. 11) Would this title be suitable/essential reading for a practitioner or policymakers market? If so, please let us know if there are any organisations, institutions or professional networks that would be interested in the work. Not qualified to answer this question. 12) How does this proposal compare to the main competing titles in this area in terms of quality of writing and content? There are not really any competing titles. I think the author has a unique niche in the field. Recommendation 13) Would you recommend: a) we publish this book as it stands or after minor revisions b) revising the proposal and resubmitting c) rejecting the proposal a) Review 2 - Francesca Lessa, University of Oxford General 1) In your own words, please provide a short outline of the project The book proposal by Professor Achugar deals with how young Uruguayans that were born after the dictatorship learn about the recent history of their country. The analysis focuses on the representations of the recent past that are transmitted to youngsters from inside their families and even in other contexts, such as the teaching of history at school and popular culture and music. 2) Of the different product categories outlined above, which do you feel this proposal best fits and why? This proposal best fits under category one, 'monograph,' because it is a work of high academic standard geared to the academic community and scholarship. Proposal 3) Does this proposal offer a useful and/or original contribution to the field? Is it addressing any new/emerging areas? The proposal constitutes an original and exciting contribution to the field. Very few publications in English, if any, have tackled the way in which young people in Uruguay find out about the recent past of violence and dictatorship. This proposal tackles new areas, looking at the different ways in which young Uruguayans interpret the past through family life, teaching at school but also through popular culture and music. This multifaceted approach is new and innovative. 4) Does it adequately engage with recent scholarship? Does it take existing scholarship forward? The proposal engages with all the relevant the existing literature well and clearly highlights how such topic has largely been side-lined from existing publications. There is a large scholarship on the memory of state terrorism in the Southern Cone. Yet, only a few scholars engage with intergenerational transmission of memory in English about Uruguay. The work of Gabriela Fried is the sole other example. Jelin and Lorenz published a book on memory and education in Spanish which has chapter on Uruguay but the book is already 10 years old, having been published in 2004. In addition, the proposal by Achugar is based on extensive and recent ethnographic research carried out in Uruguay and frames this topic through a broader lens that includes school education but also goes beyond it. So in this way, it clearly builds upon but simultaneously transcends existing scholarship. 5) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal? You may wish to consider structure, organisation, coherence and presentation of material; scope, coverage and breadth of appeal or degree of specialisation; whether there are any obvious omissions; timeliness and likely shelf-life of the research; what proportion of the work, if any, will require substantial re-working? Are any suggested improvements fundamental to the project's success or discretionary matters which might be addressed after the project has been accepted? Having read the proposal and also a draft of chapter 3 at the Latin American Studies annual conference, I can confidently say that this is a very strong book proposal which is built upon profound knowledge of Uruguay and the relevant literature on linguistics, memory, and transitional justice. In addition, the research is very deeply grounded on a two-year ethnographic study carried out by the author, making it for a solid and interesting project. The proposed structure of the book is clear and works very well, with particularly interesting chapters such as chapter 6 that looks at popular songs, comic books and carnival and the ways in which discourses about the recent past permeate these spheres too. My main suggestion for improvement would be to include a section possibly in chapter 1 or in the introduction to provide a brief historical background to the dictatorship and the ways in which the human rights violations of the recent past were dealt with in the aftermath of democracy. This brief addition would enable a large audience of non-Uruguayan experts to understand the historical and political context to which the analysis carried out in the later chapters is related to. 6) Do you feel the author/editor is suitably qualified to produce a high quality book on this topic? The author of the book is extremely well qualified to produce a very high standard publication because of her impressive academic trajectory and her knowledge of the country that is the subject of the study. 7) If you are aware that the book is being considered for inclusion in a specific series, please comment on its suitability for that series. The book is rather interdisciplinary and could work well in a series about Language and Linguistics, but could also be included in the series on Latin American studies or Memory studies. Market and Competition 8) Who would you anticipate the main readership of this book to be (in terms of field and level)? The main readership of this book would be academic scholars and researchers, as well as postgraduate students and even policy-makers. 9) Would this title be suitable for the student market as a core text? If so, would you adopt/recommend this book for any courses you teach? This title would be suitable for post graduate level courses on Latin American studies, memory studies, transitional justice and human rights. I would definitely adopt and recommend the book to my students. I teach a course on human rights in Latin America. 10) Is this book likely to have interdisciplinary and/or international appeal? This title is likely to have a very interdisciplinary appeal since it draws upon a number of fields such as linguistics, memory studies, Latin American studies, as well as human rights and transitional justice. It will have international appeal being of interest to both scholars and students in the US, Europe and Latin America. Uruguay has been very much on the international radar over the past couple of years so it will definitely be of international interest. 11) Would this title be suitable/essential reading for a practitioner or policymakers market? If so, please let us know if there are any organisations, institutions or professional networks that would be interested in the work. The topic of this book is likely to be of interest to practitioners as well. Many countries across the globe, from Latin America and Europe to Africa and Asia, have been struggling with how to teach a contested and violent past to the new generations. For these reasons, the book would be of interest to policy makers working in ministries of education that prepare curricular reforms and draw up teaching programs for schools. In addition, I would also imagine that organisations and institutions such as Facing History and Ourselves (https://www.facinghistory.org/) would find this book of great value to their work. 12) How does this proposal compare to the main competing titles in this area in terms of quality of writing and content? As stated above, there are a few competing titles in this area. Beyond the 2004 book in Spanish by Jelin and Lorenz, which featured a chapter on Uruguay, I am not aware that any other book exists that tackles this same topic. So it is fair to say that this proposal fills a void in terms of the scholarship. Recommendation 13) Would you recommend: a) we publish this book as it stands or after minor revisions X Response to the Reviews The reviews are great and their suggestions on how to improve the manuscript are clear and doable.
