Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Hardcover

Weld, Kirsten

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822355973 ISBN 13: 9780822355977

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.

The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

About this title

About the Author:

Kirsten Weld is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University.

Review:

“In a sense, Weld’s book isn’t really about history at all. It’s a book about a country that’s been run badly off the rails, where every day is characterized by appalling violence, impunity, and by state institutions that are either, as she puts it, “totally ineffectual or deeply enmeshed in organized crime.” But what you can’t help but wonder, thanks to Weld’s insightful and engrossing work, is how much better Guatemala’s situation might now be if it hadn’t lost generations of student leaders, trade unionists, intellectuals and idealists, the very kinds of people it needs to face its intractable problems.” (Peter Canby The Nation)

“The book Weld has written, entitled Paper Cadavers: Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, is brilliant and engrossing, told with the passion the topic deserves.... A study of surveillance and secrecy and of the courageous few that expose that power, Paper Cadavers is a book for us all.” (Deborah T. Levenson Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America)

"Weld’s chronicle of their efforts is extraordinary, less about an archive as a historical information source and far more about an archive as a subject, a history-maker in its own right." (Brian Bethune Maclean's)

“What Weld offers is an updated, much more compelling and theoretically sophisticated case study of why popular historical knowledge and struggles over archives matter so much and the role a politically engaged scholar might play in the process.” (Julie A. Gibbings Canadian Journal of History)

“Paper Cadavers is not a compilation of the archives' contents but rather a meditation on the relationship between archives and national history, accompanied by an account of the transformation of a rotting warehouse into the scene for writing history, and an exploration of the perceptions of the people who carried out this work. . . . [B]rilliant and essential. . . .” (Stephen Henighan Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

"'Essential reading' is an apt way to sum up Paper Cadavers. The book weaves together issues of transitional justice, human rights, historical memory, and state terror. Rich in original insight, it is of equal use to scholars and students and promises to be much cited and assigned."  (J. T. Way Hispanic American Historical Review)

“One of the most compelling sections of the volume is Weld’s interviews with volunteers who worked in the archives and their motivations for doing so, including coming to terms with the experiences of disappeared relatives and friends. A thoughtful addition to the emerging discussion on understanding archives in the wake of human rights violations of repressive regimes. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” (E. A. Novara Choice)

“Future historians who consult the PN archives will benefit immensely from this fine-grained anatomy of it; more broadly, scholars of Latin America and other regions, too, will learn much from Paper Cadavers, particularly as they ponder how the production and organization of their sources affects their scholarship.”

(David Carey Jr. Ethnohistory)

"Weld’s publication is a serious contribution to archival literature. Weld places front and centre the activities carried out within the archival walls in human rights struggles. While this is about the police archives of Guatemala, it is also about archives in general and the sometimes strained and tenuous positions in which they find themselves in relation to the powers that fund, operate, and sanction them. Even for archivists who have visited the country or who live there, not only is it reaffirming to examine archival practice and theories in a very real world setting, seeing the challenges and benefits of our professional process through this particular lens, but it is also revelatory of our own subjectivity in what we do.” (Heather Home Archivaria)

“Weld's skillfully deployed ‘dialectical’ method makes a compelling case that historical research on such questions cannot take the constitution of the archive itself for granted. She has inspired us to explore the historical processes underlying the creation of the data we collect, while reflecting critically on the relationship between this data (including that which might have existed) and the core values that drive our research.” (Charles Hale American Historical Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822355973
• ISBN 13: 9780822355977
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352