A reading autobiography between dictatorship and democracy

Abstract

During the military dictatorship that governed Argentina between March 24, 1976 and December 10, 1983, a systematic censorship plan was developed (Invernizzi & Gociol, 2002) in the cultural field that included a succession of decrees and other resolutions prohibiting reading various publications. Numerous works have addressed the issue, recovering journalistic and documentary information from the dictatorship itself where lists of publications are made explicit (literary, theoretical, school books, cultural magazines, among others) and where in some cases arguments are put into play that seek to justify the prohibitions. in terms of moral values and “being Argentine” (Avellaneda, 1986). Both in primary and secondary education and in higher education, this curtailment produced an outdated level of school knowledge (Tedesco et al, 1987) and a certain obscurantism in university knowledge, affecting the quality of the training of teachers and researchers, which was reinforced by the exclusion of professors from the university cloisters, many of them in exile, missing or teaching in private spaces, in what was called “catacomb university” (Kaufmann, 2001, Casareto & Daleo, 2020). Books for boys, girls and adolescents as well as educational materials for all educational levels (Pesclevi, 2014), including the university, were part of the censorship lists, which had an effect on the representations about knowledge and the experiences of reading and training of adolescents who go through both the times of dictatorship and those of the so-called democratic transition (Velázquez Ramírez, 2015) through different educational levels. Assuming reading autobiography as a genre (Papalini (coord.), 2016), this article presents a journey between dictatorship and democracy, recovering references to prohibited readings and “allowed” readings (Bombini, 2020), giving their effects on the training processes. and construction of subjectivity.