The problem of scale in studies about Argentine political recent exiles

Abstract

Over the last decade, the studies about recent Argentine political exiles observes an expanding and diversifying agenda of issues and problems. Just a few years have passed from the research pioneer works (on trajectories of exiled intellectuals, on individual memories of victims and on the reconstruction of nationalcommunities in exile), to the current map of investigations that deepen all regional, comparative and transnational dimensions in the analysis of returns, humanitarian activism or repressive thinking. However,the territory of the exile studies has changed and it has done so, in no less measure, from other temporal, spatial and analytical scale brought into play. This paper reviews the accumulated production in this field in order to elucidate the potential and limitations of the different scales used. Our starting assumption is that the current commitment to the dialogue between scales is discovering new bridges that may connect the history of the political exiles with the history of the recent past of the Argentina. The work is organized in two main parts. The first part reviews the historiographical works based in both national and biographical scale. The second one focuses in the researches that deepen in a comparative, transnational and exile networks perspective.