ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some signposts and questions to invite a conversation about the "memory turn": the specific trajectories memory studies have taken in Latin America, the challenges the field presents, the field's possible futures and its pedagogical potential. It argues that while memory continues to harbor significant pedagogical and political potential for Latin American area studies, scholars of memory studies must seek renewal and remain on guard against an exhaustion of the topic. The chapter focuses on three areas that need to be addressed before imagining possible futures for Latin American memory studies: to overcome the fragmentation of memory studies through more robust interdisciplinarity; to bridge the north-south divide; and to mitigate the local-global divide so as to foster more rigorous comparative study of cases. It suggests that memory has provided an idiom with which scholars can intervene politically to advocate for democratic change in the face of neoliberalism, imperialism, attendant forms of violence, and stifling inequality.
