“You will never understand”: the monopoly of the place of speech through cultural trauma narratives in Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse cultural trauma studies and narratives in order to understand the basic features of conservative and reactionary self-understandings in contemporary societies, which can be called “monopolies of the place of speech”. Because of their extreme and radical character, I believe that cultural trauma narratives, such as testimony literature and graphic novels can give access to the most important traits of these monopolies, and to ways of countering them. These elements are inaccessibility, displacement and belatedness, which are then used to analyse contemporary fiction and non-fiction literature and graphic novels on the Brazilian Dictatorship, such as Bernardo Kucinsky’s K (2013) and others.