Reviewed by Shawn Warner-Garcia, University of Texas at Austin

How is discourse used to reconstruct and remember the past? How is discursive memory used to justify actions, construct identity, and displace the other? In her book What we remember: The construction of memory in military discourse, Mariana Achugar presents an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973–1985). In her investigation, A pulls from traditions of discursive practice, psychology, textual analysis, and historical narrative in dissecting speeches, interviews, and other transcripts from during and after the dictatorial period. Through discourse analysis and discussions of socio-semiotic practices, A traces the development of the conflict among those who supported the dictatorship and those who disagree over how to remember and interpret the military’s actions during the dictatorship. The first eight chapters introduce the role of language as A’s primary means of investigating memory construction—A discusses several aspects of memory and remembering, which include collective memories, counter-memory, institutional memory, and the way language is used to access the past.

Ch. 2 discusses and justifies the methodology. Language is unique in that it is itself a semiotic system, although at the same time it reflects and transmits other semiotic systems as well. A uses this dual aspect of language as a way of looking at the discursive practices of the military to construct both meaning and identity on both a macro and micro level.

Chs. 3–5 investigate texts of different genres (e.g. books, newspapers, interviews) produced by the military institution as well as by its officers. These chapters discuss the different discursive tools used to construct, justify, and frame the actions of the military, including agentivity, the use of metaphor, evaluation, modality, overlexification, and passivization. A uses tables and textual analyses to illustrate how and where each of these strategies are employed.

Ch. 6 presents the opinions of those opposed to the military dictatorship (e.g. left-wing social actors and families of the disappeared) as a way of illustrating the struggle to construct memory in the public sphere. This chapter also investigates discursive tools such as transitivity, modality, evaluation, and theme. Ch. 7 analyzes a speech given by the current military commander and shows how institutional identity and memory is still being debated and reconstructed. A also illustrates how the speech is received by members of the institution and of the opposition.

The book concludes by summarizing the findings and recapping how discursive practices trace the ideological struggle over how to construct a traumatic past. After painstaking textual analysis, A ultimately concludes that the construction of the military’s memory is based on prejudice against the other and situational ethics as supported by attempts to create objective and observer-oriented reconstructions of the past. She also shows how institutional memory is interconnected with biographical memory, illustrating how memory is a social phenomenon that is part of the identity-forming and group-affiliation processes of individuals. A is quick to note that it is semiotic systems that ‘mediate between the experience and the memory of it’ (198).

Any look at historical events involves a deconstruction of how such events came to be viewed as factual or historical in the first place. A impartially explains both the complex roles of the players involved and her own stake and experience in the matter. Her reflexivity is to be applauded. She also does a good job of recreating the socio-historical contexts of all of the accounts she analyses. Although A is not always clear about her use of specific textual devices such as italics, purposeful capitalization, and underlining, she ultimately succeeds in making a compelling case for her arguments. There is an emphasis on categorizations, genres, and oppositional analysis. Her writing style, although technical, is very detail-oriented, and she tries to take nothing for granted. She supplies her own translations of the texts under scrutiny as well as the works of other scholars, and she provides the original texts in the original language in footnotes and appendices.