This book by one of Latin America's leading cultural theorists examines
the place of the subject and the role of biographical and
autobiographical genres in contemporary culture.
Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate
stories - what she calls the 'biographical space' - can be seen as
symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times.
Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension.
The 'I' who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who
listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification.
Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction,
therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens
onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect
on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of
self-representation but also of life itself.
Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch's own
poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina's last
dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled
borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists
rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin
of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is
to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it
is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of
forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.
