The following is a guest post by Collection Services Division’s intern Timothy Byram. Timothy’s interest in Latin American culture led him to one of the Library’s many public programs, piquing his interest in two particular cases which he discusses here.
Litigation is defined as a contest in a courtroom realized “for the purpose of enforcing a right.” What that leaves out are the instances in which overt human rights violations have been seared into collective consciousness to such a degree that the only question remaining is how to honor their memory. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt called it the “predicament of irreversibility“: it’s no longer an issue of how to “fix” an evil, but how to best deal with its persistence in societal memory.
