With this book Susana Draper, a young scholar from Argentina now at Princeton, has made a significant contribution to comparative literature and cultural criticism. Intensely theoretical in her approach, Draper draws on Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida (historicity), Nelly Richard and Elizabeth Jelín, Felman, Laub and Morieiras (traumatic memory), and Gayatri Spivak (subalternity), as well as a host of other thinkers on architecture, urban spaces, neoliberal economics and the ways in which these both promote freedom and provide illusions of freedom. Draper engages with her theoretical sources in a highly active and critical manner. Not only does she use her theoretical landmarks for conceptual support and directional guidance, she also analyses, refines, extends and sometimes revises the very theoretical positions that instigated her study. Draper's ‘readings’ of architectural spaces are complicated with documentary narratives and literary theory; novels are further problematised with histories and theories of punitive and rehabilitative confinement; films are interrogated for what they conceal, as well as for what they show.
A foundational concept of this book, which concentrates on Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, is that ‘post-dictatorship’ is a highly questionable term. Regimes may end, but their roots and repercussions inhere, not only in leftover structures and institutions but also in democratic forms that mask an absence of real democratic substance. The easy flow of money, rampant speculation, and unimpeded circulation of goods (for those who could afford them) constituted the economic project of the dictatorships; and yet, in the new democracies, the ‘free market’ has in important ways been conflated with social and political freedom. This comes as no surprise to anyone who studies or lives in Latin America: Draper's strength in this regard lies in her analyses of the historicity of this phenomenon, which she links to deeply entrenched forms and practices of confinement. Her study of prisons, shopping malls, literary texts by Diamela Eltit and Roberto Bolaño, and films by Marcos Becchis and Alejandro Agresti makes the case that many of these habits of confinement have actually been as assimilated as they have been protested. Post-dictatorship democracy is shot through with the uncanny – what Draper, citing Benjamin, calls ‘the afterlife’ of repression. Each site, text and phenomenon, such as ‘memory marketing’, is itself a kind of palimpsest: literally, in the case of Punta Carretas; more subtly in the layered and allusive Mano de obra and Nocturno de Chile; uncannily in well-meaning culture parks and memory sites, whose own narratives may insist exclusively on one set of historical emphases and interpretations (in Argentina, for example, a heavy emphasis on Peronist over non-Peronist resistance to the dictatorship).
Draper devotes her first and longest chapter to the recent conversions of former prisons and clandestine detention centres into arts complexes, community commercial centres, memory parks and shopping malls. The prisons in question were all established in the early twentieth century as models of their kind: based on Enlightenment principles of rehabilitation, they yet devolved into places of notorious repression and violence. Draper focuses on Uruguay's Punta Carretas, which came to ‘specialise’ in political dissidents, many of whom were tortured and killed. In 1994 it was converted into a luxurious shopping mall – indeed, one of the most sophisticated and lush in Latin America, and an indication that the bad old days were over. No more prison cells, torture chambers or halls of terror, but rather beautiful displays of beautiful things among which one could wander with sensations of urbanity, well-being and freedom. Draper recounts that when Juan-Carlos López, the Argentine architect who has masterminded the recent ‘mallification’ of Latin America, first visited the interior of Punta Carretas prison, he said, ‘Why, it's already a mall.’ Draper makes much of this startling moment, in which the architecture of an enormous jail inheres in the ‘free circulation’ of goods, shoppers and contemporary flâneurs. One's gaze, one's course of movement, one's own visibility are all actually controlled through a regime of spatial organisation and aesthetics. When former political inmates asked to participate in the grand opening of the shopping mall, they were barred from the event. A whole new story was beginning, and it was one in which their voices had no place. A particularly interesting part of Draper's analysis centres on the mall's suppression not only of past carceral control but also of two famous prison escapes, the first in the 1930s and the second some 40 years later, both through the same, still existing, underground tunnels. Draper argues that Punta Carretas offers a fantasy of freedom; it literally banks on the public's willing acceptance of this illusion, on their eagerness to buy into it. For Draper, this is an indication of the society's self-imposed limits on liberty.
Draper's reading of Nocturno de Chile is especially impressive for the patience with which she peels back the historical and narrative layers, and for her acute analysis of Bolaño's use of cliché.
When Garage Olimpo first opened, I was in Buenos Aires and can attest to the inflamed reactions the film set off. Its use of the clothing and belongings of survivors and desaparecidos, appropriation of Holocaust imagery, and the love story between a torturer and his victim made it highly controversial. Draper's analysis is admirable for its composure and clarity; the pairing with Buenos Aires Vice Versa is revelatory for both works.
While I heartily recommend this book, I must note that Draper's language can be cumbersome, abstract to the point of feeling disembodied, even machine-like. The introduction is particularly clotted with terms that are ‘sliced and diced’ nearly to the point of incommunicability. I hope that her future writings will marry her conceptual vigour and close textual readings with greater narrative agility.
