Towards Amazon-centred memory studies: Borders, dispossessions and massacres

Abstract

In this article, we take Erll’s important categorisation about the three different generations of memory studies scholars as a starting point in order to propose a chronotopical dislocation that envisages Amazonia as the epistemic spatiotemporal centre of our memory studies. In doing so, we account for a pluriverse of social and ethnic conflicts, border tensions, plurilingualisms, intersections of the human with the non-human – both in terms of nature as a sentient, self-determined being and in terms of the violent dehumanisation of racialised individuals and peoples – that point not only to heterogeneous spatial conceptions, but also to hardly conciliable (and yet commonly coexistent) temporalities. Considering both Erll’s mapping of a third generation of ‘transcultural’ memory scholars and Craps’ claims about a new wave of memory studies that goes ‘beyond anthropocentric modes of cognition and representation’, we argue that Amazon-centred memory studies intersect and embrace both these tendencies. After presenting a series of case studies revolving around the complex politics of memory regarding state massacres, contentious border narratives and forceful dispossessions in the region, we try to demonstrate that Amazon-centred memory studies are not exclusively applicable to a local, circumscribed reality – on the contrary, they constitute a model that may help us make sense of other geographical realities (e.g. the Mediterranean or Australia) or function as theoretical tools applicable to different disciplines.