What we remember: The construction of memory in military discourse is a recent addition to the Benjamins series Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society, and Culture, which focuses on the discursive and linguistic aspects of political, cultural and social processes. Achugar’s project makes a fine contribution to the series and will engage all who are interested in the discursive dimensions of memory construction, the theory and application of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), military discourse, and the specific case of the Uruguayan dictatorship’s human rights abuses.
Achugar seeks to understand and explicate the discursive aspects of the struggle in Uruguay over the interpretation and memory of the military’s actions during the dictatorship that held power from 1973 to 1985. The purpose of the project is to “follow the development of the armed forces’ constructions of the past over time and to see how these constructions are maintained or transformed” (p. 21) both by the military and by the opposition (families of the disappeared and left-wing social actors). Assuming that conflicts over memory are a form of political struggle, the author considers how the military’s “official memory” was legitimated, reaffirmed, and transformed in response to challenges from the opposition and a changing political landscape. Conceiving of memory as a dynamic socio-semiotic process, Achugar identifies the discursive practices and linguistic patterns through which political actors constructed accounts of the past. In sum, the book captures the “dynamic and collaborative process that remembering is,” as Achugar’s analysis reveals the maintenance of memory to be a collective, ongoing process involving participants with conflicting political interests trying to realize competing agendas (21).
Achugar frames her analysis within an interdisciplinary conception of memory, drawing from scholarship in cognitive psychology, social psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, and semiotics. She understands memory to be a socioculturally situated practice, mediated by language, in which individual and collective memories are reciprocally connected. The study poses three questions that, very generally, concern the military’s construction and legitimation of its accounts of the past and the role the discourse of the “Other” plays in the military accounts and its own construction of the past. Achugar’s analysis in each chapter attends primarily to the social context in which the texts were produced and in which they circulated, the intertextual relationships among texts, the genre features and functions of the texts, and their construal of ideational and interpersonal meaning.
What we remember comprises eight chapters and two appendices (a chronology of key events and a sample of texts from the study’s corpus). Chapter 1 reviews a range of scholarship on memory studies and outlines the theoretical basis for studying memory as a discursive practice; chapter 2 provides an explanation and rationale of the project’s analytic framework, which integrates SFL and CDA. Combined, chapters 3–5 present a diachronic study of texts taken from different genres (a series of books published by the armed forces, editorials in a military magazine, and a confession written by a retired naval officer) and produced at both the institutional and individual level. The analysis examines how the military linguistically and discursively constructed its memory of the past while simultaneously undermining accounts by the opposition. The data for chapter 6 consist of press releases produced by the military. Achugar compares these institutional texts with those produced by the opposition to illustrate how the struggles over memory took shape in the public sphere. Chapter 7 examines a commemoration speech celebrating the origins of the military given by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in 2007, focusing on its discursive and linguistic features, its reception by different audiences, and its subsequent uptake in oppositional texts. The concluding chapter summarizes Achugar’s analysis, outlines specific discursive patterns and linguistic choices comprising the military’s accounts, and considers the pertinence of her project to the construction of memory in other political contexts and institutions (e.g., the United States’ “War on Terror”).
Achugar’s work is a well-conceived and timely contribution to politically and critically oriented discourse studies. Her knowledge of the political events of Uruguay’s dictatorship period, as well as of the country’s attempts to come to terms with this period as it returned to democracy, informs her detailed analysis of the struggle over accounts of the military’s actions during that period. A few aspects of the study deserve particular mention.
Achugar’s approach to and selection of data sources superbly illustrate how to design a discourse analytic project that gets at the dynamics of discourse as process and the vital role it plays in attendant social and political processes. The project also demonstrates the conceptual work involved in data selection that is needed if one is to answer complicated questions, such as those posed by Achugar, about discourse, society, and politics. The author is not just concerned with how particular “dominant” discourses construct a “dominant” memory, but rather with the struggle over how and what to remember. The sophistication of Achugar’s corpus derives from her selection of the texts to examine, as well as her identification of the political moments from which to draw those texts.
By integrating texts produced by the institution of the armed forces with those produced by individual actors within the institution, Achugar demonstrates how institutional practices are taken up, reproduced, and transformed at the level of the individual. In this way, the study explicates how the abstract social structure of the military is enacted in and mediated through various social practices (e.g., confession, commemoration) enacted textually by institutional actors (Fairclough Reference Fairclough2003). Further, by examining texts produced by the military and the opposition, the study reveals the active interplay between dominant and non-dominant voices, interplay in which competing voices work to marginalize, recontextualize, and reproduce conflicting accounts of the past.
Achugar uses a longitudinal design as she examines texts produced from the inception of Uruguay’s last dictatorship in 1976 through to 2007. Key to this time frame is that it comprises five stages during which the military’s accounts of the past were relentlessly challenged by the opposition. Selecting texts from this contentious period enabled the author to conduct a diachronic analysis of how the military’s construal of the past was shaped by a rapidly changing political context and by the remonstrations of oppositional factions challenging the legitimacy and authority of the military’s accounts. Achugar’s sensitivity to the rhetorical and temporal exigencies involved in the military’s discourse enables her to deftly capture the dialogic character of the discursive production of memory.
Achugar analyzes the discursive construction of memory from both a macro and micro perspective as she aims to “establish the relationship between the social and the linguistic” (24). Her analysis of intertextuality stands out here as a solid illustration of Thibault’s (Reference Thibault1991) conception of “critical intertextual analysis,” which views intertextuality as more than the “mere mirroring” of one text within another (125). Fittingly, Achugar examines the social meaning-making practices through which the military’s accounts of the past, in conjunction with other texts, are constructed, used, transformed, and intervened in. In chapter 3, for example, she examines how the military texts reappropriate the public’s voice and marginalize the voice of the Other. In sum, by attending to texts that represent competing voices, differing social roles, and dynamic historical moments, Achugar demonstrates that the hegemonic status of dominant narratives is not a totalizing state of achievement. It is, rather, a contested process of becoming in which dominant narratives continually need to be reaffirmed, transformed, and reproduced.
A few issues with the writing and editing of the book warrant mention. Although Achugar explicates most of the concepts underlying her study, there are a couple of notable exceptions. Key to her analysis of the military’s accounts are how the military legitimates its past actions and how its accounts recontextualize those of the opposition. Given the prominence of these concepts in her analysis, and the fact that they have been theorized and analyzed within SFL and CDA studies (e.g., Linell Reference Linell1998, van Dijk Reference van Dijk2003, and van Leeuwen Reference van Leeuwen2007 on legitimation, and Bernstein Reference Bernstein1990 and Fairclough Reference Fairclough2003 on recontextualization), her lack of explication is puzzling. For another thing, the issue of translation should have been explicitly addressed in Achugar’s discussion of method. The excerpts analyzed are English translations of documents originally written in Spanish (although, in a couple of places, Achugar discusses the Spanish rather than the English form). Although she provides the original Spanish version for each excerpt, Achugar should have addressed the theoretical and methodological complications posed by such translations. Finally, the volume would have benefited from another round of editing, as problems with syntax, grammar, organization, and proofreading occasionally interfere with the analysis and argument.
As an Uruguayan citizen and the daughter of left-wing parents exiled from their homeland, Achugar provides an engaged yet dispassionate account of how the sociocultural memory of Uruguay’s difficult past was discursively produced, contested, and transformed. Her work seeks not to render a partisan judgment about the military’s actions but to expose the logic underlying those actions. In this way, her work will prove immensely valuable to scholars seeking to understand, and intervene in, the discursive aspects of social and political struggles.
