A host of Chilean films, the fiction of Alberto Fuguet, Marco Antonio de la Parra, Isabel Allende and Jose Donoso, and hundreds of detention and torture centers that have been razed, abandoned or returned from the clandestine to serve as schools, stadiums, hotels and churches are all emblematic of this anti-statist, micro-political remembering. A photographic "topoanalysis" of torture centers reveals that much like palimpsests---ancient Roman wax-coated tablets that were inscribed, scraped and re-inscribed---the ethnographies of torture sites bleed through with horrific narratives that unsettle the dictator's historical project while suggesting geographically "housed" memories that cultivate unresolved mnemonic tensions. I conclude that today Chile contends with the legacy of authoritarianism primarily via a destape (a "socio-sexual uncorking"). By parading naked bodies and sexuality in public, individuals recall somatic tortures and demand future political transparency. In this way, contemporary culture has settled on a potent palimpsest---the layered meanings of flesh---yet, this destape also reveals that the dictator's neo-capitalism has triumphed as the body has become the primary object of consumptive pleasure.

The 1973 military coup in Chile deposed the democratically elected Salvador Allende and installed a dictatorship that terrorized the country for almost twenty years. Subsequent efforts to come to terms with the national trauma have resulted in an outpouring of fiction, art, film, and drama. In this ethnography, Macarena Gómez-Barris examines cultural sites and representations in postdictatorship Chile—what she calls "memory symbolics"—to uncover the impact of state-sponsored violence. She surveys the concentration camp turned memorial park, Villa Grimaldi, documentary films, the torture paintings of Guillermo Núñez, and art by Chilean exiles, arguing that two contradictory forces are at work: a desire to forget the experiences and the victims, and a powerful need to remember and memorialize them. By linking culture, nation, and identity, Gómez-Barris shows how those most affected by the legacies of the dictatorship continue to live with the presence of violence in their bodies, in their daily lives, and in the identities they pass down to younger generations.

Furthermore, she argues that this contest has been enacted literally and figuratively on the stage of human bodies as sites of domination and resistance. Examining works by Pia Barros, David Benavente and the Taller de Investigacion Teatral, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and Isabel Allende, Political Bodies engages emergent feminist critiques of authoritarianism in terms of gender and class, history and language.

This book discusses the representation of women's memories of the dictatorship in the recent work of seven Chilean novelists.

Since the demise of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990, collaboration and complicity - both in the torture chamber and civil society - have been taboo topics not only for the Chilean left but also for society at large. By revisiting the experience of Luz Arce Sandoval - a leftist militant turned collaborator with Pinochet's secret police - Luz Arce and Pinochet's Chile raises urgent political and ethical questions about how nations carry out unspeakable violence in the name of "progress" and "democracy." Juxtaposing interviews, legal documents, and academic analysis, this book probes the personal and collective dimensions of torture, collaborationism, truth, justice, reconciliation, and memory, issues that resonate in Latin America and beyond.

Politics under Salvador Allende was a battle fought in the streets. Everyday attempts to “ganar la calle” allowed a wide range of urban residents to voice potent political opinions. Santiaguinos marched through the streets chanting slogans, seized public squares, and plastered city walls with graffiti, posters, and murals. Urban art might only last a few hours or a day before being torn down or painted over, but such activism allowed a wide range of city dwellers to participate in the national political arena. These popular political strategies were developed under democracy, only to be reimagined under the Pinochet dictatorship. Ephemeral Histories places urban conflict at the heart of Chilean history, exploring how marches and protests, posters and murals, documentary film and street photography, became the basis of a new form of political change in Latin America in the late twentieth century.

"A lucid and well-thought-out study of artistic expressions that evoke experiences from the years of the military dictatorship in Chile. . . . The perceptive analyses, intelligent insights, and breadth of information . . . make this [book] compelling reading."--Maria Ines Lagos, University of Virginia Lazzara examines the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the diverse narrative forms Chilean artists have used to represent the memory of political violence under the Pinochet regime. By studying multiple "lenses of memory" through which truths about the past have been constructed, he seeks to expose the complex intersections among trauma, subjectivity, and literary genres, and to question the nature of trauma's "artistic" rendering. Drawing on current theorizations about memory, human rights, and trauma, Lazzara analyzes a broad body of written, visual, and oral texts produced during Chile's democratic transition as representations of a set of poetics searching to connect politics and memory, achieve personal reconciliation, or depict the "unspeakable" personal and collective consequences of torture and disappearance. In so doing, he sets the "politics of consensus and reconciliation" against alternative narratives that offer an ethical counterpoint to "forgetting and looking toward the future" and argues that perhaps only those works that resist hasty narrative resolution to the past can stand up to the ethical and epistemological challenges facing postdictatorial societies still struggling to come to terms with their history. Grounded in Lazzara's firsthand knowledge of the post-Pinochet period and its cultural production, Chile in Transition offers groundbreaking connections and perspectives that set this period in the context of other postauthoritarian societies dealing with contested memories and conflicting memorializing practices, most notably with Holocaust studies.