Remembering Trauma, Refusing Disappearance: 'Corregidora,' 'Bastard' and the Transnational Labors of Memory (original) (raw)
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My aim in this essay is to map out the contributions that cultural texts lend to the discussion on human rights, memory, and citizenship. To that end, I read Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, paying attention to the notion of a criminal state that is developed in this account. With these three topics in mind, I unravel the processes constituting criminal networks of power and their logic of articulation. I also use two psychoanalytical notions: perversion and abjection. Both serve to navigate the meaning of a senseless psychotic history that produces phobic states of being. This is the way I interpret what Guatemalan people lived through at the end of the twentieth century and beyond. On the other side of abjection and perversion, there is "justice" and "truth." These two words are a compass for those who, with serenity, perseverance, and tenacity, decide to control radical evil and prevent the disruption of the social bond. It is axiomatic, as a policeman told the investigators of the crime that "there are some things that should be investigated and others not" (42). From the get-go, Goldman's chronicle produces a sharp sensation of uneasiness, a general feeling of disturbance. As the narrative progresses, a psychotic, or at least perverse, atmosphere oppresses us. 1 The memory of that "time of fear and sadness-but also of unforgettable intensity-stayed inside me," says the author, "like a dormant infection that can sometimes be stirred back to life, even by a glance" (142). How does Goldman produce these sensations? He does so through hyperbole, which conveys exaggeration and exorbitance; through metonymy, which conveys the perpetual disorientation of the sign due to its incapacity to signify; and
Identities Journal
Anchored in the Santiago General Cemetery, this essay analyses the management of revolutionary memory under neoliberalism. Juxtaposing the gravesites of Salvador Allende and Víctor Jara, I theorise the gendered and racialised processes through which collective dreams for justice – and even radical politics themselves – come to be co-opted under neoliberal capitalism. If in Jara’s grave we see the state performing the part of the hyper-masculine disciplinarian father, I argue, in Allende’s grave we witness the state as the begrudgingly accepting father, ready to take in the repentant children back into the nation, in exchange for obedience. Finally, I turn to alternative memorialisation practices performed by the nation’s discontents, and namely ongoing struggles for collective self-determination and decolonisation. Ultimately, I situate critiques of neoliberalism in Chile in dialogue with intersectional queer and transnational feminist scholarship on the seductive logics of neoliberalism – and emergent forms of justice that appear just beyond its purview.
Memory Symbolics in Chile: Manuel Guerrero Antequera, Cultural Memory and Political Consciousness
2012
37 years after the September 11 “golpe de estado” and 21 years after the restoration of democracy, Chileans continue to explore various ways to represent authentically their painful and conflicted memories of Pinochet’s lengthy dictatorial reign. Pinochet’s legacy continues to reverberate strongly four years after his death. Even Heraldo Munoz, Chile’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and current Permanent Representative, and certainly no apologist for the dictator, acknowledges “Pinochet’s long shadow,” recognition of the ruler’s deep but highly contested historical repercussions, especially in the economic arena. As sociologist Macarena Gomez-Barris suggests in her recent book, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), the transition period between dictatorship and full democracy has led to many distinct manifestations of what she terms “memory symbolics,” efforts that in their own way tell of the dictatorial past and its often unfortunate aftermath....
Multitude & Memory in Chile's Social Uprising
South American Quarterly, 2024
Ricardo is a thirty-eight-year-old emergency medical technician from Santiago. During the 2019 social uprising, he lived in a central neighborhood close to the epicenter of the protests. He worked at a local clinic attached to a public university, where student protests and clashes between masked demonstrators and police were common. Ricardo comes from a right-wing family: only he and his sister have left-wing leanings. He has never been a member of a political party, group, or organization, and in fact he expresses mistrust of them, and of Chilean politics in general. However, the neighborhood he lived in as a child bordered on another, Villa Francia, which has a long history of political and community organizing and is considered a combative place. Ricardo used to go there to get involved in protests on emblematic days.1 A few years ago, he began to take part on and off in a musical troupe that often appears at popular street events and commemorations of September 11, the date of Pinochet’s coup d’état. In Ricardo’s account, two main hermeneutical and agential phenomena configured the uprising as a critical event with the capacity for political subjectivation.2 First, Ricardo’s identification of the revolt as a historical event from his own lifetime, as he drew parallels between the social uprising and the 1973–90 dictatorship, the biggest sociopolitical catastrophe of Chile’s recent history. Second, the power of the masses in public demonstrations, which activated Ricardo’s desire and spurred him on to a total and systematic immersion in the front line of the protests,3 evoking memories of the urban street fights he knew in his childhood. Once the dictatorship was over, Ricardo and his friends had repeatedly asked themselves, “What would I have done if I’d been there?” Faced with the social uprising, at first an unintelligible event, Ricardo returns to, and brings into the present, that generation-specific question: “Where am I going to be now?” His response rose to the occasion: an extraordinary level of immersion in, and by means of, street combat. The memory of the anti-dictatorship movement, the power of the spontaneous masses, and the street as a place of encounter and struggle will activate Ricardo’s political subjectivation, and the configuration of the uprising as a critical event, one that he interprets in the light of the past. Some academic accounts of Chile’s social uprising refer to the “irruption of memories” through this protest cycle. These may be long-standing memories—such as of the violence visited on the Mapuche people4 by the Chilean state—memories of the feminist or neighborhood movements, and/ or memories of the recent dictatorship (Angelcos and Pérez 2017; Vivaldi and Sepúlveda 2021; Garcés 2019; Han 2012). Certainly, the repressive policing of the protests, and the decreeing of “states of exception” revived memories of the dictatorship the length and breadth of the country. The protests became places of commemoration and homage to victims of dictatorship-era violence, and spaces in which to denounce remaining gaps in truth and justice. The demands that inspired the uprising also referred back to the period of the political transition (1990s), which had first denounced the legacy of the neoliberal societal model imposed at gunpoint under the military regime. The relationship between these memorialization practices and new processes of political subjectivation however remains unexplored, above all among actors who do not belong to political and protest movements such as the student, feminist, or environmental movements (Bravo and Pérez 2022). In this context, Ricardo’s case demonstrates the intergenerational staying power of certain subterranean memories in the trajectories of people who either did not live through the dictatorship or lived it as children and do not have a history of activism or involvement in social organizations. Decades later, during the social uprising, memories of resistance to the dictatorship evoked an ethical imperative in this ordinary citizen. Ricardo experiences this as a form of duty to his time and to his own history. This experience blurs the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics, as it becomes the engine of mobilization and a desire for social transformation not through political militancy or trajectories, but rather in unexpected and sudden awakenings and agency arrangements.
This essay for the Stanford University Press blog reviews new information that the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, may have been poisoned by agents of the Augusto Pinochet regime rather than dying of the prostate cancer from which he suffered. The larger purpose of the essay is to compare historical memory processes in Chile to memory struggles in the U.S., particularly over the torture of prisoners in the War on Terror, racial injustices, and school shootings. I argue that Americans, too, live with the legacy of atrocities; yet when we fail to see these events through the shared global lens of human rights, we lose the opportunity to garner wisdom from the study of other nations that have dealt with legacies of widespread violence. Specifically, I point to three lessons that can be learned from historical memory processes in Chile: 1) that institutions associated with the violence do not have basic legitimacy, and cannot be partners in shaping policy for the present or future, until they have addressed their own histories; 2) that symbols matter, whether they are the Confederate flag or Pablo Neruda’s seaside tomb, because they communicate our willingness to recognize the memories of others as having the same depth and urgency as our own; and 3) that the period of reconstruction or reconciliation after atrocities is very long. This ongoing project must take place across a multitude of places and institutions, and not only the obvious ones.