Where memory dwells
Subtitle: culture and state violence in Chile
By: Macarena Gómez-Barris.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780520255838; 9780520255845
Subjects: Collective memory -- Chile; Art -- Political aspects -- Chile -- History -- 20th century; Chile -- History -- 1973-1988; Chile -- History -- 1988-
Description: "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 Gomez-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 Nunez, 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, Gomez-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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Ice and political heat : cultural memory mediates the past; title: Searching for Villa Grimaldi : memory's democratic promise; title: Making torture visible : the art of Guillermo Núñez's art in Chile's transition; title: Ghostly screens unsettle the past; title: Doubling 9/11 : exile culture and activism.