INTERTWINED MEMORIES AND TRAUMA WORKING-THROUGH: THE SHOAH AND THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP IN BRAZILIAN LITERATURE

• Grant number: 24/16821-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Orlando Seligmann-Silva
• Grantee: Sabrina Costa Braga
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to address the relationship between history, memory and literature through the multidirectionality between the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of the Brazilian military dictatorship, examining contemporary fictional texts written by the second and third generations after the Holocaust (i.e., Brazilian descendants of survivors), on the one hand, and, on the other, by family members and descendants of victims of the Brazilian military dictatorship. To this end, it will be shown how the history of the Shoah and anti-Semitism is presented in the literature about the military dictatorship. Generally, the use of the memory of the Holocaust works as a metaphor to elaborate the new (and still open) wound caused by institutionalized torture and the murder of specific groups. Meanwhile, the violence exposed during the military dictatorship is one of the factors for the resurgence of Brazilian literature about the Holocaust. It thus reveals how multiple traumatic pasts meet and intertwine in a heterogeneous present. In this way, it is hoped that it will be possible to answer how and to what extent these fictional literary representations can communicate the specificities of the Brazilian case while illustrating the reach of the memory of the Holocaust in World Literature. The concept of multidirectional memory is the general methodological tool to be used to relate fiction about the Holocaust and the dictatorship. The use of the concept of multidirectional memory will be carried out with care so that it does not point to a simply harmonious relationship between different memories, that is, so that the political issues involving the dynamics of memorialization processes are not ignored. (AU)