ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Promises Beyond Memory, Vikki Bell shows how archives of contemporary political violence in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia challenge the idea that simply sheltering the documentation of violence is sufficient to fulfill the obligations of attending to the past. Beyond mere preservation, these archives, museums, and sites of memory invite exploratory modes of enlivening the past through aesthetic practices like photography, installation, film, and performance. These practices foster the “survivance” of memory where populations still grapple with legacies of violence and often state-sponsored mass disappearance and torture. Rather than produce a definitive account of the past, such survivance facilitates polyvocal articulations that open deeply political and ethical questions around contested histories. They may even create moments for what Bell terms “tender forgetting”—the ability to remember without reawakening trauma. Integrating theory, extensive archival work, and interviews with artists, archivists, museum workers, and survivors of state violence, Bell analyses the creative ways that archives pass on stories of violence as they seek to defend against attempts to rewrite the past.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Vikki Bell is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina.

REVIEWS

“Focusing on Chile, Colombia and Argentina, this outstanding book innovatively challenges the often-unreflective hope that memory can effectively serve as a bulwark against intergenerational cycles of violence. Instead, it proposes that dramatizations of the archive are central to mnemonic stewardship, understood as a curatorial and dynamic, temporally extended project. All in all, a must read for all students of political memory.”
-- Mihaela Mihai, author of Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance

“Vikki Bell’s prose is beautiful and fluid, and her mastery of the complex subject matter is quite striking for its empathy and humanity.”
-- Kaitlin M. Murphy, author of Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas

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