Drawing Memories : The “Comics for Identity” Project in Argentina as an Ethical and Aesthetical Challenge

Abstract

The hypothesis of my ongoing postdoctoral project aims to track the different interventions made through comics regarding the Argentine dictatorial process of 1976-1983, taking into account the period of democratic restoration from 1984 to 2015. It is through the proposed timespan that this project means to search for the different strategies allowed by graphic narrative - in tension with the editorial and political limits of their production context -, verifying how, during the different stages of this historical process, those resources kept mutating while the perspectives on the dictatorial process were changing as well, as the claims for Human Rights violations took different forms, involved new players and challenged a shocked society. According to this hypothesis, we would be transitioning a stage where comics are being considered for their testimonial value which serves as a tool that can be assumed from an effective and active legal framework, unlike a first stage where the priority was to be able to tell the horror without being discovered by the authority, appealing to strategies such as allegory and metaphor, or to the later denunciation within a process of reconstruction that had just begun and was still precarious. The project also proposes to review how these same subjects have been treated by comics in other South American countries, dealing with similar traumatic social experiences: Can we track similar strategies? What?s the social value of comics in those countries? What's the current situation regarding the processes of democratic restauration and the revision of the dictatorial past? With a new generation of South American comic artists on the rise, these questions pose a challenge to both comic storytelling and comic studies.