This article proposes the concept of ‘memory script’ to analyse how, in the aftermath of political violence, memory activists narrate their lives in a way that is practised, repetitive and performative. Through a self-reflective life history of Aluízio Palmar, a Brazilian human rights activist and former political prisoner who suffered intense torture under military rule, this approach seeks to elucidates the personal and political contours of somebody's decision to transform their experiences into a public narrative. A close reading of Palmar's various platforms of memory-sharing reveals the complex moral reckoning of an activist's own trauma.

Este trabalho analisa comparativamente alguns aspectos convergentes da obra do pensador alemão Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) e do escritor uruguaio Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015). Apresentam-se, assim, certas afinidades entre os dois autores no que diz respeito à proposição de uma crítica à história oficial, tal como concebida a partir das classes dominantes, em prol da recuperação da memória de grupos sociais submetidos à violência e à opressão. Destacam-se, ainda, correspondências metodológicas acerca do emprego de analogias e metáforas por ambos os autores.

In 2013, Argentina's then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked controversy for her decision to replace a monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires with one of nineteenth-century mestiza revolutionary Juana Azurduy. This article examines the history and iconography of these monuments, exploring the intersections between public space, art, politics and memory. It argues that these monuments — one representing Argentina's previously maligned Italian immigrant heritage, the other its forgotten indigenous culture — demonstrate how fundamental struggles over national identity have been embedded and contested in the capital's urban landscape, in ways that remain influential. It highlights Argentina's 1910 centennial and 2010 bicentennial as key to these efforts, and examines the power/politics of place in the central plaza where various actors have fought for public commemorative representation.

Narratives of memory have received considerable attention in Argentina but rarely have these been examined in relation to the 1982 Malvinas War. This article focuses on national memory narratives of the war manifest in educational resources and explores how and under what conditions local ways of remembering can transform and/or reproduce such narratives, through research within secondary schools in Río Gallegos, a city in the south of Argentina. It shows how the city's connections with the military and the war generated sensitivities that influenced how the Malvinas was engaged in the classroom. The localised framings deviated from predominant national memory narratives by underplaying the broader context of state terror and overlooking histories associated with the Malvinas before 1982.

This article addresses the various mechanisms by which the religious figure of the Christian martyr became a useful notion in Argentine political discourse. It argues that the process by which the idea of the ‘martyr’ was secularised and politicised was actually initiated by religious agents themselves. The analysis considers how commemoration initiatives devised by religious agents, social movements and political actors have brought ‘Catholic martyrs’ into the pantheon of national symbols. It also deals with the various semantic shifts seen in the public discourses of religious agents themselves, shifts that extend the boundaries of an eminently religious category by associating it with other figures in a more specifically political imaginary, such as that of the hero and the victim. The article shows how the political power of the religious figure of the martyr lay in the way various actors could use it to invoke the image of a legitimate and heroic victim of political violence. It thus allowed those actors to sidestep the vexed public question of whether those being commemorated had had any involvement in armed struggle.

For over a century prehistorians have approached the engraved stone plaques of the Iberian late Neolithic and Copper Age (3000–2500 BC) from a monolithic and idealist perspective, viewing the plaques as representations of the Mother Goddess. Most have not addressed the plaques' variability, their method of manufacture, the organization of their production, or their biographies. This article presents new interpretations of the Iberian plaques based on the first comprehensive on-line catalogue of the plaques – the Engraved Stone Plaque Registry and Inquiry Tool (ESPRIT) (Lillios 2004) – which holds records for over 1100 plaques, each unique, from over 200 sites in Portugal and Spain. Analyses of the plaques' raw material, style, chaîne opératoire, and distribution over space suggest that different plaque types had different functions and meanings, which shifted over time. Two plaque types: the Classic plaques and the Biomorphic Simple plaques are considered in this article. In their diverse forms, the Iberian plaques appear to have been durable records of regional and local group identities and could have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian late Neolithic and Copper Age.