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This article traces the ways in which memories of historical trauma inscribed in the built environment of Buenos Aires, Lima, and Cusco inform the fiction of Argentine Tununa Mercado and Peruvian Karina Pacheco Medrano. Each author represents fictional cityspaces after projects of public memorialization have already begun to carve out spaces of memory in response to dictatorship (Argentina) and to the conflict with the Shining Path (Peru). These novelists, neither of whom is Jewish, map the relationship between the spatial dimension of the textual and the textual dimension of the spatial, acknowledging the value and meaning of invisibilized Jewish bodies whose presence continues to haunt the modern urban space.
June 2016: Katharine G. Trostel is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in 20th and 21st century Latin American literature (particularly the “post-68” period), women’s writing, memory and trauma studies, memorials and monuments, city spaces, haunting, and ruins. Her dissertation, “Memoryscapes: Women chart the post-trauma city in 20th and 21st century Latin America,” examines the treatment of urban space and memories of state-sponsored violence in the works of Latin American women writers of the post-trauma or post-dictatorship generation.