Michael Taussig, Palma Africana (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 258, $25.00, pb.
dictatorship cannot be understood without listening to the narratives of those women who survived repression and the way in which they conceptualise the degrading treatments they suffered, as well as how they ‘visualize the indelible marks of the traumas they experienced’ (p. 41). Rethinking the construction of memory through women’s testimonies is a way of engendering narratives, and expanding the understanding of the narrative subjects and underscoring both gendered approaches and the participation of women is the process of transitional justice. Sutton’s book carves out a space for the centrality that gender played in the militancy, repression and resistance as well as for the place that gender subsequently has (or should have) in the construction of memory. Thinking of memory in terms of gender is not new in the Argentine landscape, and Sutton recognises some of the works written by other scholars and enters in dialogue with the discipline itself, by focusing on the act of listening as a crucial part of being a scholar who deals with issues of testimony and memorialisation. Listening also involves being able to recognise that the accounts included in this book were silenced or framed (in the double sense of the term) by patriarchal discourse. One of the main contributions of this book is to show that memory without the narratives of women survivors is not only incomplete but also inaccurate. Advancing a ‘democratic culture’, Sutton argues in her conclusion, ‘requires listening to a variety of embodied stories, not all of which have had the chance to fully emerge’ (p. 251) Sutton understands the construction of memory as an ongoing process, and by challenging the patriarchal framework of memory, her book is both a timely and important contribution to the reconstruction of the recent Argentine past from a gendered perspective.