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Mapping South-South Connections pp 263–294Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Remembering Obedience and Dissent: Democratic Citizenship and Memorials to State Violence in Australia and Argentina

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Part of the book series: Studies of the Americas ((STAM))

Abstract

Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citizenship practice and acceptable citizen–state relations. This chapter explores the significance of Argentinian and Australian memorials for understanding how past political action shapes a horizon of political possibility. First, it examines how ANZAC memorials celebrate empire, obedience and the status quo. ANZAC exists in a field of other memorials and cultural texts in Australia that negate politics and possibility for emancipation. Next, it discusses several Argentinian memorials that reflect the diversity of Argentina’s politics of memory. While questions of popular complicity in the state violence of the 1970s have yet to be memorialized, Argentine memorials nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of dissent as a basis of democratic citizenship. Drawing out the significance of the comparison by discussing memorials in relation to theories of citizen agency, this chapter problematizes the northwest-centric view of democracy as end, and reveals the importance of remembering challenges to power as a basis for ongoing democratization. Based on a comparison of memorials in relation to theories of democratic citizenship, the chapter contends that Australia’s political subjectivity is amenable to dedemocratization while Argentina’s reflects the possibility of open-ended democratization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ‘third wave’ generally refers to countries in Latin America, southern and eastern Europe that were seen to have transitioned from dictatorship to democracy between the 1970s and 1990s (Huntington 1991).

  2. 2.

    There are numerous small monuments relating to acts of dissent throughout Australia’s colonial history, which are archived here http://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/government/dissent. However, relative to war memorials, these monuments and the events they commemorate occupy marginal spaces in the national political imaginary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia

    Robin Rodd

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  1. Robin Rodd
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Correspondence to Robin Rodd .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Fernanda Peñaloza

  2. Washington State University, Pullman, USA

    Sarah Walsh

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Rodd, R. (2019). Remembering Obedience and Dissent: Democratic Citizenship and Memorials to State Violence in Australia and Argentina. In: Peñaloza, F., Walsh, S. (eds) Mapping South-South Connections. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78577-6_11

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