Remy Roberts

Postmemory and Political Action: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Argentina and Guatemala

Principal supervisor: Professor Paulo Drinot, UCL Institute of the Americas. 
Subsidiary supervisor: Dr Par Engstrom, UCL Institute of the Americas. 
 

This PhD project draws on the concept of postmemory to consider how the legacies of traumatic historical events affect future political action. Postmemory describes how the generations that follow such events – the ‘postgenerations’ – relate to the memories passed down to them by survivors. Through comparative historical analysis of political activism in Guatemala and Argentina from the 1980s to the 2000s, the project considers whether this theory can help us understand the political actions of postgenerations and if these activities can, in turn, shed light on the nature of inherited trauma.