Hispanic Review

In the novel Não falei, Beatriz Bracher engages with post-dictatorial memory in Brazil in ways that move beyond the denunciatory genres that have dominated literary production in the aftermath of dictatorship. Part of a younger generation of writers revisiting the cultural memory of dictatorships in the Southern Cone, Bracher offers new ways of reading the effects of dictatorship and resignifying these experiences in different social contexts. Building upon the critical work of such authors as Flora Süssekind, Idelber Avelar, and Nelly Richard, in dialogue with theoretical considerations on subalternity, hegemony, and discourse, in this essay I examine the ways in which Não falei explores the limits of the discursive logic of memory in postdictatorial Brazil. I argue that Bracher offers a more critical engagement with postdictatorial memory than much recent cultural production by creating an alogical narrative space that destabilizes the discursive mechanisms that dominate the cultural politics of memory today.