Horror as Real and the Real as Horror: Ghosts of the Desaparecidos in Argentina

Abstract

This article explores the fear of political otherness in Mariana Enríquez’s short story “The Inn” in which the author combines the reality of Argentine history with elements of the gothic horror style while maintaining a sharp focus on social criticism. “The Inn” blurs the lines between the reality of a not-so-distant past and elements of the supernatural to delve into an Argentine history scarred by the last dictatorship. This article seeks to examine the use of the figure of the desaparecido as representative of a politics of erasure of the political other that has been systematically censored and unacknowledged. It is also an examination of the re-membering and re-inscribing of the desaparecido as an intergenerational cultural exercise to counteract an institutionalized narrative of erasure and forgetting.

Keywords

• Argentina
• disappeared
• haunted geography
• Mariana Enríquez
• memory
• spectral spaces