UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Representations of Transnational Violence
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Representations of Transnational Violence: Children in Contemporary Latin American Film, Literature, and Drawings A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures by Cheri Marie Robinson 2017 © Copyright by Cheri Marie Robinson 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Representations of Transnational Violence: Children in Contemporary Latin American Film, Literature, and Drawings by Cheri Marie Robinson Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Adriana J. Bergero, Chair In this study, I examine representational strategies revolving around extreme violence and child/adolescent protagonists in films, literature, children’s drawings, and legal/political discourses in contemporary Latin American culture from an interdisciplinary approach. I analyze the mobilizing potential and uses of representations of child protagonists affected by violence and the cultures of impunity that facilitate its circulation. Within the works selected, I explore ways in which children can become sites of memory and justice through acts of witnessing, empathy, and the universal claim of natural law, with a primary focus on transnational and multidirectional depictions of violence (i.e. a violence in circulation) in extra-juridical, politicized, or aberrant environments in Latin American works. The historical periods contextualizing this study include the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) and its interconnectedness to the violence of WWII and the Holocaust in Reina Roffé’s “La noche en blanco” (Chapter 1), the impact of ii transnational trajectories of genocidal violence in Argentine South Patagonia in 1959-1960 as depicted by Lucía Puenzo’s novel Wakolda (Chapter 2), Argentina’s transition to democracy (1990s) and the critical questions it raised regarding appropriated children and amnesty/justice in Dir. Gastón Biraben’s Cautiva (Chapter 3), and the circulation of the traumatic in an orphanage in Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s filmic interpretation of violence during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in El espinazo del diablo (Chapter 4, Part A). My research investigates inter- discursivities from a non-traditional approach to literature, film, and archival drawings, which include fictional (diegetic) drawings by Spanish children (in del Toro’s films) and non-fictional drawings made by Argentine children in exile in the Netherlands (Chapter 4, Part B). I extensively focus on analyzing instances of children’s experiences with what I term “recycled violence.” This repetition of extreme violence is demonstrated in certain works in their trans-temporal and trans-spatial return to the pain and horrors of the Holocaust or to other unresolved periods of violence still resounding in the present moment. In the works analyzed, child protagonists are enormously affected by political decisions, wars, and the severe breakdown of law and order. Considering these extraordinary circumstances, it is important to justly address the traumas/wounds caused by the radical and systemic violence of those who should protect them – guardians who instead inflict violence. Injustices are approached in this study through an exploration of the concepts of spectatorship and witnessing, the imperative of the Good Samaritan or ethical responsibility, and possible connections of truth and testimony to justice. Finally, I postulate that child/adolescent protagonists may facilitate the establishment of a fortified empathy in an audience/readership numb from an incessant bombardment by violence, among other reasons for the use of children in works revisiting periods of extreme violence. iii The dissertation of Cheri Marie Robinson is approved. María C. Pons Jesús Torrecilla Maarten H. Van Delden Adriana J. Bergero, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv To my family, biological, extended, and otherwise. You taught me how to listen and love. To my friends. You are diverse, funny, intelligent, out-there, and beautiful. To my mentors, advisors, and professors. You have inspired, challenged, and guided me. To all those who have felt the sting of a violence never quite past. You adapt and overcome daily. This is for you. Some days the violence of the past reclaims you; other days it sleeps in a Maze of tunnels running through your conscious and subconscious worlds. Through these tunnels, there blows a wind. At times, it is a softly flowing breeze caressing your spirit, A gentle reminder you are not ever alone, even when alone. Other times, it is a gale-force wind, a hurricane crushing you, Backing you against the wall, the hard boundary of that hidden maze. Always, in this wind, you perceive a presence and a light, A presence that watches and records, a brilliant red spot of light signifying “on.” The presence is an eye, many eyes, a room full of people, a field full of Watching spectators, a country, a world-wide audience viewing your secrets, Stepping inside your tunnels and blinding you with that little red pin-point of light. It is a subtle violence that follows you; a hidden, seemingly benign presence stalks you, And although there are witnesses, no one lives in your tunnels but you. No one can understand that you didn’t really escape a corporal invasion, a bodily violence, Because your soul, your mind, your tunnels have lost the illusion of safety, and This loss is irrevocable. v The wind now disturbs your maze along with that prick of red, an electric beam Searing into the palaces of your mind – not illuminating them but filling them with a helpless Rage, a sense of loss, a stain that will ever and always remind you of that breach in The tunnel walls. The presence has been punished and the light extinguished, yet the ghostly remnants of them Linger on the wind. There is ever that past violence threatening to pursue you, Ever an anxious thought, a panic, a slight increase in respiration giving you away. The violence may have left, but its marks still sting your soul. Sometimes violence comes in the guise of a non-violent observation, but it is no less Violent for the one who is the object of its gaze. And even little red lights leave a perforation a mile wide. There is a steady breeze blowing through the tunnels today, a reminder that violence Never really slumbers. It merely transports itself and melts into the shadows of someone else’s tunnels. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction to Critical Theories on Violence, Trauma, Memory, and the Child/Childhood 1 1. Recycled Violence: Germany, Spain, and the Argentine Military Dictatorship 3 2. A Short Story, a Novel, Two Films, and Children’s Drawings: Descriptive Outline of Chapters 7 3. Who is a Child/Adolescent? What are Childhood and Family? 14 3.1 Children, Childhood, and Rights 16 3.2 Family 19 3.3 The Home and State: Private or Public 20 4. Why Child or Adolescent Protagonists? 22 5. Key Lines of Inquiry 24 5.1 Memory and Multidirectionality 25 5.2 A Modernizing Violence 28 6. Trauma Studies and the Connectivity among Violence, Trauma, and Memory 30 6.1 Spectatorship 31 6.2 Witnessing 36 6.3 Violence Enacted against Memory: The Cases of Argentina and Spain 39 6.4 The Production of Trauma and a Surplus of Memory 41 6.5 Narratives of Belated Experiences 44 II. Part 1, Chapters 1 & 2: Violence, Family, and the Private Sphere 47 Chapter 1. The Violence within and the Violence without: Reina Roffé’s “La noche en blanco” 1. The Kingdom of Childhood and the Kingdom of Adulthood 47 2. The Violence within and the Violence without 52 vii 3. A Radiating Violence, an Innocent Child, and a Belated Trauma 55 4. The Micro-Sphere of the Private as a Reflection of the Macro-Sphere of the Public 64 5. Questions of Representability 70 6. Experience Contrasted with Innocence: The Known and the Unknown 75 7. Seeing does not Equal Understanding 86 Chapter 2. Cultures of Impunity and the Child’s Body as a Battlefield in Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda 92 1. The Connectivity of Violence and Cultures of Impunity 97 1.1 Concentration Camps: The Ultimate Impunity 107 1.2 Argentina: A Permissive Impunity 117 2. The Child’s Body as a Battlefield: A Twisted Violence and a Complicit Violence 127 2.1 Obsessions: Violence and Love 133 2.2 Survival as Proof of Failed Extermination Projects 139 III. Part 2, Chapter 3: The Personal as Political and an Empathetic/Violent Witnessing in Gastón Biraben’s Cautiva 143 1. Memory, Identity, and Justice 143 1.1 Theoretical Contextualization: Film 144 2. The Connection to Politics and Witnessing: The Personal as Political – Body, Law, Family, and State 148 2.1 Bare Life and States of Exception 150 2.2 Las Madres and Las Abuelas 154 2.3 The Rearming of Memory: Analyses of Relevant Sequences and Legislation 158 a. Cristina 158 viii b. The Judge’s Office: Cristina/Sofía 163 c. Adoptive Parents or Kidnappers 165 d. Identity and Justice 172 e. Cristina/Sofía: An Identity in Transition 175 f. Marta, the Nurse, Bears Witness: Sofía’s Birth 182 2.4 A Violent Witnessing 189 2.5 Memory is Powerful 191 3. The Implications of a Child/Adolescent Witness: A Violent Witnessing and/or an Empathetic Witnessing 195 3.1 The Purpose of a Memory/Postmemory Film like Cautiva 195 3.2 A Reactivation of the Public by the Personal and a Fortified Empathy 198 IV. Chapter 4: Children: Bodies of Unexpected Resilience, Resistance, and Unforeseen Justice 202 1. Part A – Representational Strategies of the Traumatic in El espinazo del diablo 204 1.1 ¿Qué es un fantasma? 204 1.2 Re-creations of Violence: The Initial Wounding 207 1.3 The Diminishing of Distance: From Repulsion to Solidarity 211 1.4 The Transnational Desaparecido/a and Shades of the Intolerable 215 1.5 The Reconstitution of the Traumatic and the Pursuit of Justice 218 2.