Writing Against Silence: Rodolfo Walsh and the Ethics of Testimony
摘要
This chapter focuses on Rodolfo Walsh’s Los irlandeses, reading these stories as a narrative experiment that bridges diasporic memory and Argentina’s broader struggles with violence, silence, and historical accountability. While Walsh is often studied through his journalistic works, this chapter repositions his Irish-themed fiction within his wider ethical project, revealing how the Irish diaspora becomes a prism through which to examine the intersections of ancestry, displacement, and testimony. Through stories that traverse exile, guilt, and fragmented inheritance, Walsh reconstructs the moral and emotional geography of belonging, giving narrative form to voices historically silenced by class, colonialism, and dictatorship. Drawing on theories of testimony, translation, and cultural memory, the chapter argues that Los irlandeses performs an act of cultural mediation, transforming private lineage into a collective inquiry into Argentina’s identity after trauma. In Walsh’s hands, diasporic fiction becomes a tool of moral reflection: a means to narrate the nation from its peripheries and to recover speech from silence. The chapter thus situates Walsh as a transatlantic writer whose literary imagination fuses memory, ethics, and resistance into a distinctly Argentine poetics of truth.