Disputes over historical memory in Southern Patagonia, Argentina: between public speech and document fictions (1983-2023)

• Applicant: Dr. Lisandro Relva
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563171639

This project aims to investigate the historical memory contestations between public speech (local press and political discourses) and documentary fictions that can be found in a series of public and private archives in the province of Santa Cruz, in the Argentine Patagonia, in the period from the restoration of democracy (1983) to the present. This period covers 40 years of uninterrupted democracy in Argentina. The term ‘documentary fictions’ includes, on the one hand, the textual output of local historiographical research in a historical moment of disciplinary consolidation, in which the dispute over the construction (and legitimate ownership) of the region's past (especially with its multiple histories) is being played out. On the other hand, this term refers to a group of literary works that, through previous documentary research on Southern Patagonia and insofar as their content is presented as ‘factual’, are located between fiction and history. The corpus, which can still be supplemented, consists of “Fuegia” by Eduardo Belgrano Rawson (1991), “La tierra del fuego” by Sylvia Iparraguirre (1998), “Los suicidas del fin del mundo” by Leila Guerriero (2005) and “La jaula de los onas” by Carlos Gamerro (2021). The first main objective is to build the first digital archive of Southern Patagonia, which, based on interdisciplinary research and using various tools of digital humanities, will serve to map, connect, visualise and reproduce the documentary collections in and about the region that represent the complexity and diversity of collective memories (mainly those of the settlers and those of the Tehuelche and Mapuche communities) interacting in the area during the period 1983-2023. The second main objective is to publish a book in an academic publishing house that will discuss the controversies surrounding historical memory in Southern Patagonia since the restoration of democracy in Argentina. This book will present and analyse, from a pluridiscursive perspective, the history and geopolitical present of Argentine Southern Patagonia in terms of interethnic dynamics, especially with regard to the relationship between its double dependence on the Argentine nation state and an autonomous region that is formed between Chile and Argentina.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position