And History Is Not Over: Vegetal Temporalities and Reverberations

Abstract

This article proposes vegetal reproduction and photographic reproduction as analytical models for accounting for the ways in which the past survives in the present. These models propose non-linear temporalities, defined by latency, germination, and fragmentary reproduction that destabilize narratives of closure and progress. The text addresses the problem of figuration and historical continuity, arguing that events from the past return through new figurations and embodiments that demand new strategies of legibility and visualization. This approach foregrounds the political and historical dimensions of narrative and of communal forms of memory. Through analytical vignettes on the Ixil genocide trial in Guatemala (2013) and references to memory processes in Bojayá, Colombia, the article examines how violence returns as heterotemporality and spectral presence, requiring new modes of historical legibility. The first part explores both models; the second analyses these memory cases in contexts of transitional justice; the third discusses the type of historical continuity implied by the vegetal model. The article concludes by proposing the vegetal model as a way to understand the survivals of the past for the imagination of alternative futures.