Discourses of Memory Denial and the Concept of Dignity: The Graderías de la Dignidad Memorial at the National Stadium in Chile

What is it about?

In 2020, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies approved the project that sanctioned negacionismo; that is, the denial of the violation of Human Rights committed by state agents during the civic-military dictatorship (1973–1990). Using discourse analysis, the objective of this article is to examine the variants of negacionismo that emerged in media posts after the inauguration in 2015 of the traumascape Graderías de la dignidad within the National Stadium. I aim to contrast these discourses with the objectives promoted in the memorial and reflect on their ethical values. The results show that negacionismo reveals the ascent of a necropolitical discursive frame alongside a rhetoric of disenchantment with the political system that seems to impede any reflection on the value that social memory and memorials may have to healing a society and restoring the dignity of its victims.

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Photo by Benjamín Gremler on Unsplash

Photo by Benjamín Gremler on Unsplash