The historians, the witnesses and the recent past. About the limits of expressible in the territory of exile

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze the tensions that existed among witnesses and historians in a specific chapter of the Recent History, trying to elucidate the representations of the past created by political exiles during the last military dictatorship and those created by historians. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, memory policies from the time of the exile to present time are analyzed in an attempt to recognize who were the authors of such stories, where was the emphasis, what was their content, and how the exiles’ memories articulate with social memories on the exile that have been around in Argentina until today. In the second part, a journey into the historiographic field itself is performed, determining the profile of the exile historians, the main topics, approaches and interpretation logics, the most widely used sources and the most common work methodologies.

Keywords

• historia reciente
• Argentina
• exilio
• dictadura militar