Submission of articles: FronteiraZ 37 - 50 years of the military coup in Argentina – literature and the authoritarian experience in the Southern Cone

50 years of the military coup in Argentina – literature and the
authoritarian experience in the Southern Cone

Amanda Lacerda de Lacerda - Universidade estadual de Campinas
Leonardo da Silva Claudiano - Pontifícia Universidade católica de São Paulo
Valéria Gomes Ignácio da Silva - Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

In 2026, the civil-military coup, which introduced in Argentina one of the most
violent and systematic regimes of political repression in Latin America, reaches its 50th
anniversary. Not only does this anniversary invite remembrance but also reflection on
the ways through which literature has constituted a privileged space for denunciation,
symbolic elaboration of violence and resistance to the erasure imposed by authoritarian
states.
The Argentinian intellectual tradition focused on interpreting this period and its
reverberations is widely recognised through the work of authors such as Beatriz Sarlo,
Ricardo Piglia, Josefina Ludmer, Elizabeth Jelin, Nora Strejilevich, among others, who
pruduced critical, essayistic, testimonial and literary texts about memory and its
crossings between the past and the present of the military dictatorship.
The Southern Cone dictatorships – Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay – prove
to be a fertile terrain for investigating the modes through which extreme historical
experience is inscribed in language. Latin-American literature, with special emphasis on
the period after the year 2000, has grappled with this “insidious cloud” (Sarlo, 2005,
p.9), seeking to give it contour and to invest it with meanings that contribute to an
understanding of the present.
In the works of such writers as Félix Bruzzone, Nona Fernández, Marcelo
Rubens Paiva, Renato Tapajós, Mário Benedetti, Fernanda Trias, Alejandro Zambra,
Marta Dillon, among others, reality does not present itself as a transparent given, but
rather as a construction under tension from traumas, silences, fragmentations and
disputes over meanings. The different forms of realism – in its variations, impasses and
divisions – operate as narration strategies capable of unmasking the discourse of power
and reelaborating the traumatic experience.
This dossier proposes to gather articles that examine literature as a mode of
denunciation and remembrance of Latin American dictatorships, by considering both
works produced under that regime and those written in the post-dictatorship period,
when memory, testimony and rewriting of the past become central fields of symbolic
dispute.

In this issue of Revista FronteiraZ, we hope to receive contributions
problematizing and updating the debate on representations of trauma related to Latin
American dictatorships. In that sense, we welcome transdisciplinary proposals
discussing – but not limiting to – the following themes:
- Intersection among history, memory, forgetting, imagination, and affects
experienced under dictatorial regimes through literature and/or other artistic
forms;
- Comparative approaches to literary works engaged in memory works from the
1000s to the present, and institutional, journalistic, cultural discourses, among
others, that produce tensions and re-readings of the history of dictatorships;
- Language experiences (self-writing, montage, biography, essay, staging,
performing, dramatization etc) in the representation of traumas produced by the
Southern Cone dictatorships through literature and/or other artistic forms;
- Contemporary narrative and/or poetic productions within the scope of accounts
of affiliation and the dynamics of generational transmission of experience under
authoritarian regimes.
- Comparative approaches among Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean and Uruguayan
literature from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective.
Deadline for submission of articles: June 10/2026