Septembre 2013 marque le quarantième anniversaire du coup d'Etat militaire de Pinochet au Chili et de la chute du président Allende. Beaucoup de Chiliens, fuyant la répression, se sont alors réfugiés en France où ils se sont implantés. En 2003, au moment du 30e anniversaire du coup d'Etat, Eric Facon réalise la série Hijos del exilio. Il a rencontré ces fils et filles d'exilés à Paris et à Santiago, où la moitié d'entre eux était retournée. Ce travail a été exposé au Mercato Centrale di Roma dans le cadre du Festival Internazionale di Roma en 2003, puis la même année au Museo de Arte Contemporaneo à Santiago du Chili. Ces 25 photographies ont été acquises, en 2009, par la Cité Internationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration à Paris. Dix ans après, que sont-ils devenus ? Créaphis a le projet de publier ces photos dans la petite collection Format passeport. Le photographe a retrouvé ces enfants d'exilés et de nouveau recueilli leurs récits.

This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.

The wars of the twentieth century uprooted people on a previously unimaginable scale to the extent that being a refugee became an increasingly widespread experience. With the arrival of refugees, governments of host countries had to mediate between divided national populations: some wished to welcome those arriving in search of refuge; others preferred a strategy of exclusion or even expulsion. At the same time, refugees had to manage conflicts of the self as they responded to the loss of nationhood, families, socio-political networks, material goods, and arguably also a sense of belonging or home. While return migration was usually perceived by governments and refugees alike as the best solution to the dilemmas of forced displacement, consensus about the timing and dynamics of how this would actually occur was very difficult to achieve. In practice, the return of refugees to their countries of origin rarely, if ever, produced a wholly satisfactory outcome. Conflicts clearly resulted in forced displacement, but it is equally true that forced displacement created conflicts. The complex inter-relationship of conflict, return migration and the sometimes chimerical, but still compelling, search for a sense of home is the central preoccupation of the contributors to the two volumes of the Coming Home? series. Scholars from history, literature, cultural studies and sociology explore the tensions between nation-states and migrants as they have anticipated, implemented or challenged the process of return migration during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book begins with Western Europe and progresses to Central and Eastern Europe from the period of the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War era, whilst the second volume – Coming home? Vol. 2: Conflict and Postcolonial Return Migration in the Context of France and North Africa – shifts the focus to the colonial and post-colonial framework of the French-North African nexus. What emerges from the two volumes of essays is that, as ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent as home could appear, it was nonetheless central to migrants’ preoccupations about returning.