IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 129

counterpart to memory, forgetfulness
emerges when there is a social unlinking of individuals or various groups.
Memories become diluted when they
stop communicating memories, after the
disappearance of the common base that
allowed its collective construction. This
bridge between the individual and the
social makes it possible to generate,
acknowledge, and reconstruct memories.8

rative dignified enough to be exhibited
in our memory, inclusion, and even
physical existence.
If we conjugate Anderson’s triple census-map-museum articulation, the Argentine State relegated its black population to absence: no counting, nowhere
to be found, there is no way (nor any
reason) to represent them. This is why
there are hardly any places in memory
about them, which is how this fits in
with Halbwachs’ thought. Argentina’s
participation in the African genocide
can be understood as a tragedy of errors
with reverberations that are still in effect. Its involuntary actors are enslaved
Africans and their descendants, colonial
origin Afro-descendants, on the one
hand, and slave owning society, on the
other. As we discover the dimensions of
this genocide, what remains is to explain why it is a tragedy of mistakes. In
the best of cases, I am attempting to
rescue the marginal space to which
blacks were relegated in the dominant
narrative; I take the silence as a common denominator in this asymmetric
historical account.

According to Anderson (1993), the
State deliberative employs museums,
along with other institutions to construct
national memory, e.g., the census and
maps:
“Or course, the census, maps, and museums analyze the totally unconscious
way in which the nineteenth-century
colonial State (and the policies its mentality inspired) dialectically instated the
grammar of nationalisms that later on
emerged to fight them. In fact, we could
even say that the State imagined its local adversaries…way before they took
on an authentic historical existence.
After the creation of these images came
the abstract quantification/serialization
of people via a census, the application
of logos to public spaces, due to maps,
and the ‘ecumenical’ and profane ‘genealogization’ of the museum made
intertwined contributions” (Anderson
2000: 14-15).

This was a silence imposed on the enslaved, to dominate them, the silence of
historians who allowed that past to be
minimized and given a kind sheen. It
was the silence of social researchers
who worked in keeping with a conservative way of thinking, ignoring the
scientific method. They made the issue
irrelevant to create a vacuum controlled
by their authority (Cirio 2007b). It was
the silence that became common sense
in the complicit society, which still
thinks its incorrect to think of AfroArgentinean-ness (Frigerio 2006, 2008)
and, paradoxically, it was the self-

Despite the fact this study is focused on
the Asian Southeast, if we were to look
at the decade of 1820 in Argentina,
which served to observe generalized
“atavistic fantasies in the whole of nationalist thought,” (op. cit. 15), we
would see that our incipient freedom
coincided with a need to concoct a nar-

129