Social Sciences 710
Amy Cosimini
"Truths Produced and Sold: Latin American Media as a Transitional Justice Memory Merchandiser"
This project explores the potential of cultural productions to act as supplementary transitional justice mechanism, which (re-) frame how nations remember past human rights abuses. Through a comparative analysis of 21st century cultural production in Argentina and Brazil, it is argued that representative films and television programs are uniquely placed to complement and question institutional memory policies that tend to monumentalize one truth and one past in an attempt to construct a coherent collective memory narrative. Drawing from human rights, media studies and transitional justice scholarship, this project promises to open up a space for a discussion on the constructed nature of memories and the media's intentions as a new structural memory frame.
Amy Cosimini is a PhD candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota where she researches the relationship between human rights and memory production discourses in Southern Cone literature and popular culture. She previously earned her B.A in Political Science and Latin American Studies at Macalester College and her M.A. in Hispanic Literature and Culture at the University of Minnesota.
