Orphans and origins: Family, memory, and nation in Argentina and South Africa, 1983--2005

"Can the iconography of the family be retained as the figure for national unity, or must an alternative, radical iconography be developed?" Anne McClintock's question remains crucial in post-dictatorship Argentina and post-Apartheid South Africa, where attempts to construct democratic national communities have been informed by the language of the family. In particular---and as I show in close readings of contemporary plays, films, and novels---the production of fictional genealogies has been intimately connected to the construction of new national identities. Orphans and Origins argues that the retelling of roots and the revision of family origins has been a central form for reimagining the "imagined community" in both Argentina and South Africa. It further argues that the shape that such fictions have taken points to the possibilities and the limits of familial discourse as a basis for democratic nationhood.; In an extended introduction, I look broadly at the intertwined constructs of family and polity, arguing that fiction from the Dirty War and Apartheid expresses social anxiety through narratives about the loss of origins, orphanhood, or other familial ruptures. In the 1990s, this anxiety crystallizes around two orphan figures: the child of the "disappeared" in Argentina and the multi-racial or "Coloured" child in South Africa, often represented as a child of rape. As I then demonstrate in two country-specific sections, these figures become symbols for the nation precisely because their actual or metaphoric orphanhood requires them to reimagine their own genealogies. The questioning of origins that occurs in representations of these figures---a questioning staged through the fractured lens of memory---becomes a way for artists and activists to debate governmental policies of "truth" and "reconciliation" and to imagine alternate social orders for the nation as a whole. The Argentina section, entitled "Orphans," consists of three chapters, which explore works by Juan Jose Saer, Griselda Gambaro, Marco Bechis, Marcelo Brodsky, Luis Gusman, Martin Kohan, Patricia Zangaro, Albertina Carri, and Maria Ines Roque. The South Africa section, entitled "Origins," comprises two chapters, focusing on texts by Andre Brink, Zoe Wicomb, J.M. Coetzee, Achmat Dangor, Zakes Mda, Tracey Rose, and Nadine Gordimer.