The memory of militarism and the ‘value’ of resistance: an analysis of the Resistance Memorial of São Paulo

ABSTRACT

In the last 30 years, South American scholars and activists have produced a wealth of knowledge and representations practices concerning militarism and mass atrocities committed by the Armed Forces. Nonetheless, this body of work has been relatively neglected by debates in the field of Critical Military Studies (CMS). This paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing an analysis of the Resistance Memorial of São Paulo (RM-SP), a site inaugurated in 2009 in the former headquarters of the Brazilian political police. The analysis is based on short-term visits to the RM-SP in 2014 and 2018 and informal conversations with members of staff. The paper makes two central arguments: first, as a site of memory situated in the Global South and with strong links to survivors, the RM-SP invites radical accounts of political violence, pushing the boundaries of the concept of militarism beyond what is normally contemplated in CMS. Second, drawing on poststructuralist and post-Marxian critiques, the paper argues that the RM-SP is also a site of struggles; a space in which a radical narrative is held back by a certain language (a system of equivalences) that provides symbolic legitimacy to the present (neo)liberal order. On one hand, the RM-SP offers an intricate analysis of political violence that disturbs traditional liberal accounts of civic-military relations. On the other, its compelling representations of resistance are constantly threatened by the risk of commodification; the confusion between the values of past struggles and that which makes them exchangeable in the eyes of the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Militarism
• political violence
• state terrorism
• memory
• transitional justice
• resistance
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Audrey Reeves for organising this special issue and offering invaluable comments on initial versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Rachel Massey and Thomas Tyerman for the inspiring conversations of the past two years and to Julia Gumieri, Marilia Bonas and Maurice Politi for all the support provided. Lastly, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for their careful reading of this paper and very enlightening feedback. Needless to say, all shortcomings of the present work remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For notable exceptions see (Diamint 2015; Kruijt and Koonings 2012).

2. Memorial da Resistência de São Paulo, in the original Portuguese. All translations hereafter are my own.

3. Figures disclosed in a personal interview with Maurice Politi, president of an association of former political prisoners, at the RM-SP on 4 July 2014.

4. See note 3.