Multidirectionality of memory and trauma working-through in Brazilian fictional literature: Holocaust and Brazilian military dictatorship

• Applicant: Sabrina Costa Braga, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551538407

The problem of the relationship between historical reality, fiction and memory can be fruitfully investigated through the traumatic experiences that make it necessary for individuals and societies to negotiate memories and for exploring how the past is continuously reinterpreted and reappropriated in the present. This project aims to present the above mentioned relationship through the multidirectionality between the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of Brazilian military dictatorship by examining contemporary fictional texts written by the second and third generations after the Holocaust (namely, the Brazilian descendants of survivors), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by family members and descendants of victims of the Brazilian military dictatorship. The history of both Shoah and Antisemitism is largely present in the literature dealing with the dictatorship. It works usually as a metaphor for working-through the new (and still open) wound originated by institutionalized torture and murder of particular groups. Meanwhile, the violence exposed during the military dictatorship is one of the factors for the reemergence of a Brazilian literature about the Holocaust. This reveals how multiple traumatic pasts meet in a heterogeneous present. One of the questions to be answered is how and to what extent these fictional literary representations can communicate the specificities of the Brazilian case while illustrating the scope of Holocaust memory in World Literature. The attempt to working-through the trauma of the Shoah in Brazil is intertwined with the national trauma of the dictatorship, which is a trauma that has not yet been sufficiently dealt with and is subjected to the most diverse ideological appropriations. So, it is possible to ask: to what extent these warped memories can be intersubjectively communicated through their literary representation? The fictional language — as a mode of narrating the past — can be seen as a possibility of negotiating questions of memory and identity with multiple generations about a silenced historical trauma. This is the case especially in Brazil, in which the recent rise of the far-right paved the way to the denialism not only of institutionalized torture but of the very idea that there was a military dictatorship in the country for two decades, strengthening the cultural and institutional remnants of authoritarianism. By analyzing the sources, it will be possible to show that multidirectionality is what allows fictional and autofictional writing about dictatorship not to be necessarily postponed to a second or third generation writing, as in the case of the Holocaust. The memory of the Holocaust has gone through a period of greater latency than some later catastrophes, and it is the place that this event occupies in collective memory that ends up allowing other memories to arise in the literary field and in fictional form.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position