Articles:
- Chilean Children’s Literature and National Identity: Post-Dictatorship Discourses of Chileanness Built through the Representation of Indigenous PeopleIbaceta, Isabel
Bookbird, 2014, Vol.52 (3), p.53-64
"This paper analyzes images of aboriginality created in Chilean narratives for children, and argues that these images try to instill contemporary ideas of national identity. The books Tres Príncipes [Three Princes] (1994) and Flora, Cuentos Andinos [Flora, Andean tales] (2008) are closely examined, showing how cultural practices and geographical motifs drive the renovated, post-dictatorship discourses of Chilean identity." - What About Realism? Alberto Blest Gana, Georg Lukács, and Their Chilean ReadersPatruno, Luigi
Open Cultural Studies, 2021, Vol.5 (1), p.54-65
"In this article, I analyse Georg Lukács’s theories of realism in relation to Alberto Blest Gana’s work. For this purpose, I explore two essays that have greatly contributed to locating the Chilean author’s novels within the realm of literary realism. The texts chosen for my study are Jaime Concha’s prologue to the edition by the Ayacucho Library and Ricardo A. Latcham’s essay “Blest Gana y la novela realista” [Blest Gana and the Realist Novel]. Concha and Latcham find appropriate categories for the interpretation of Blest Gana’s work in Lukács’s essays. In their readings, they accurately apply notions such as the selective principle or the typology of characters. However, while using those insights as a shared critical platform, they arrive at different interpretations of what is meant by realism. The article elucidates the role played by Concha and Latcham in the Chilean intellectual field and shows how literary genealogies inform their critical projects." - A Queer Mother for the Nation Redux: Gabriela Mistral in the Twenty-First CenturyFiol-Matta, Licia
Radical history review, 2014, Vol.2014 (120), p.35-51
Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in the remote Elqui Valley of Chile. She ascended from prototypical small-town schoolteacher to the most famous Latin American woman of her time in her multiple guises as educator, diplomat, and poet. For decades this 1945 Nobel Prize winner in literature has circulated as a saintly national mother, in counterpoint to her queer sexuality, a source of much fascination. In January 2007, an extensive personal archive of Mistral emerged. It was compiled and ordered meticulously by her last companion, Doris Dana, from the beginning of their relationship in the late 1940s until Dana's death in 2006. This article explores the changing Mistral icon in the context of 1990s “Chile de la transición,” particularly a 2001 controversy over her appropriate reception and circulation, and then considers the reception of the Dana archive and the state's recent moves of archival appropriation. - The Insolent Gaze of Chilean Poet Elvira HernándezMarambio, Soledad
World literature today, 2020, Vol.94 (4), p.44-48
"When police are blinding protestors on Chile's streets, eyes like poet Elvira Hernández's become more important than ever." - Archival operations in post-dictatorship novels: memory and Chilean human rights recordsAgüero, Antonia Torres ; Ruiz Zúñiga, Marcela
Archives and records (Abingdon, England), 2022, Vol.43 (1), p.56-74
The junction between the memory of violence of the past and fictional registry is a dimension of post-dictatorial society's cultural dynamics. While the testimonial narrative is dominant in the literary sphere, the archive as a repository of memory and documental inscription, with the capacity to iterate and transit from one social field to another, challenges regimes of truth and lineal temporality of official memory. This article identifies, characterises and compares the way in which records are employed in contemporary Chilean post-dictatorship narrative. The archive enables us to problematise and contextualise the relation to the recent dictatorial past and the opening up of new fields of reflection. The incorporation of records in four recent Chilean post-dictatorship novels (Puño y Letra by Eltit; Sprinters, Los Niños de Colonia Dignidad by Larra; La Dimensión Desconocida by Fernández and Monte Maravilla by Lafferte) is achieved through quotes or theme development. Such resources bring to light the fascination as well as the scepticism that archives generate in literature, as well as their effectiveness for expressing the intricate, and even contradictory, mechanisms of memory. - Con(versan) las hablas de la poesía: nütram, parlamento y oralitura en Elicura ChihuailafMellado, Silvia
Recial, 2020, Vol.11 (18)
Una escena de especial importancia en la literatura del sur es la conversación entre el poeta y sus compadres, comadres, abuelos, abuelas. En ella, a veces, hay también una instancia en la que el poeta recibe un relato. En el caso de la poesía escrita por poetas mapuches (sea en castellano o en mapuzugun), esta escena de conversación adquiere una dimensión distinta, puesto que se relaciona con la noción nütram, propia del mundo mapuche. Exploro la poesía del Premio Nacional de Literatura Chilena 2020, Elicura Chihuailaf, a partir de las relaciones entre poesía y nütram, parlamento y oralitura, elaborada por el poeta. El nütram se halla intrínsecamente relacionado con el parlamento —cuyos sentidos políticos de negociación se remontan, en la historia del pueblo mapuche, al siglo xvi— y con la ineludible noción de oralitura, entre otros aspectos, en el marco de una poesía tensionada entre lo individual y lo colectivo, entretejida con la oralidad de la comunidad que la impulsa y respalda. - Una nana para el cuerpo ausente: En Nombre de Ninguna de Rosabetty Muñoz (Ediciones Kultrún, 2008)Noelia Soriano Burgués
Recial, 2020, Vol.11 (18)
El presente artículo analiza una obra literaria del área cultural sur (Espinosa 2009, 2016): En Nombre de Ninguna (Ediciones El Kultrún, 2008) de Rosabetty Muñoz (Ancud, Chile 1960). La que se origina a partir de la lectura de una noticia policial publicada en 2003, en el diario El Llanquihue: el hallazgo del cuerpo de un bebé en el basural Lagunitas de Puerto Montt, Chile. A partir de esa lectura, Muñoz escribe este texto que propone al lector un recorrido por un álbum familiar que cruza mujer y violencia. La obra indaga, desde una compleja configuración de texto e imagen, en la vinculación entre territorio y cuerpo. Por otro lado, la articulación con lo visual en el libro se conjuga con desplazamientos genéricos (del microrrelato al poema), textuales (del libro-objeto al libro-álbum) y discursivos (del narrativo-poético al testimonial), entro otros. - Creación y recreación : los juegos de la cita en la literatura chilena de hoyAdriana Castillo-Berchenko
Cahiers d'études romanes (Aix-en-Provence), 2001, Vol.5, p.111-120
La création littéraire chilienne des vingt dernières années, aussi bien dans les œuvres écrites in situ que chez les auteurs de la diaspora, est riche et diversifiée. Cette activité littéraire est le résultat d’une réaction vigoureuse contre l’autoritarisme militaire des années 80. Ce qui détermine une manière de concevoir la citation comme procédé littéraire majeur, c’est l’articulation significative d’un passé littéraire bien vivant, mais absent, avec un présent précaire qui dure dans le temps. L’étude examine les cas des romanciers Antonio Skarmeta et Isabel Allende, ainsi que des poètes Oscar Hahn et Marjorie Agosin.
- Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the PresentSkuban, William E.
Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, 2008, Vol.65 (1), p.101-103
"Observing that various nonstate actors, such as working-class communities and human-rights and survivor groups, responded to this official memory with their own countermemory, Frazier interrogates the past and discerns a history of state-sponsored violence, from the largely forgotten massacres of Oficina Ramírez (1891) and La Coruna (1925), to the slaughter at Escuela Santa Maria, and finally to episodes of state repression, torture, and execution at detention camps in Pisagua during various eras. Frazier, trained in both anthropology and history, brings both disciplines to bear in her study; indeed, the material culled from her oral history research and participant-observation with human rights groups makes for a gripping tale." - When fiction anticipates reality. Television fiction in Chile (2012-2018)Cristián Cabello
Series (Bologna), 2021, Vol.7 (2), p.61-72
"On October 18, 2019, the Chilean social outbreak was unleashed, which exposed the crisis of the neoliberal model established by the dictatorship. During 30 years of democratic transition, he managed the socioeconomic model, however, during this time profound social conflicts, new political forces, and economic inequalities were made invisible by the power elites were nesting. Serial television fiction - broadcast during the second decade of 2000 - proposed realistic narratives about the recent political history of Chile, opening spaces for discussion on the conflictive areas of the neoliberal model and showing new political actors through fiction. To learn about the characters and conflicts against neoliberalism that characterize the Chilean fiction series of the last decade, we analyze four Chilean audiovisual fictions that received state subsidies and that are inspired by real events that occurred during the post-dictatorship period: El Reemplazante (2012), Juana Brava, políticamente incorrecta (2015), Zamudio: perdidos en la noche (2015) y La cacería: las niñas de Alto Hospicio (2018). In these productions, the traces of social unrest that had been accumulating for years during the democratization process and that erupted in a serious social crisis in October are discovered." - The Mapuche Undead Never Forget: Traumatic Memory and Cosmopolitics in Post‐Pinochet ChileMariella Bacigalupo, Ana
Anthropology and humanism, 2018, Vol.43 (2), p.228-248
"The Mapuche undead, killed by the Chilean state but lacking funerals to finish them as persons, remain trapped in the places of their deaths. They are both symbols of Mapuche rage against state-sponsored genocide and social agents who play central roles in Mapuche cosmopolitics and multitemporal memory making. While memory studies focus on pastness and national commemorations the celebration of individual martyrs, the undead foreground the collective trauma of all Mapuche killed in a place at different times and realize this trauma in Mapuche everyday lives." - Entwined Tellings and the Fragility of the Unique: Relating Narratives of Detention and Survival in Pinochet's ChileBell, Vikki
Third text, 2018, Vol.32 (1), p.125-149
This article considers how we put together stories about the (violent) past, emphasising how stories emerge through our selective attentions that are themselves necessarily dependent on the modes by which the past is sustained, whether those be traces or material supports that sign(post) the past, or through the care and words of human subjects. Taking as its focus the author's experience of chasing stories from the Chacabuco ex-detention centre in the Atacama desert, Chile, the article argues that one's receptivity to stories of 'what happened' requires both passivity to receive and creativity, since nothing - neither art, nor memorials, or even human subjects - truly 'speaks for itself'. As researchers, we facilitate the way stories - often as in this case, shocking, horrific stories, but also humorous, wonderful stories of human kindnesses and sociality - are passed on. Like a game of cat's cradle, we must receive that entangled crystalline past carefully, for we will turn and entwine it such that new relations and connections appear, and others may be lost from sight. Such a process reminds us of an inherent responsibility; the art of allowing related stories to acknowledge the multiple subjects and struggles for which they are told while affirming the fragility of each unique existent. - Forging Feminisms under Dictatorship: women's international ties and national feminist empowerment in Chile, 1973-1990Pieper Mooney, Jadwiga E.
Women's history review, 2010, Vol.19 (4), p.613-630
Focusing on the period of dictatorship, this analysis explores Chilean feminists' empowerment through international ties when feminism gained legitimacy as a vehicle for social change in the aftermath of the United Nations International Women's Year in 1975. Centering on three types of encounters that marked women's coalition-building and their international ties, both personal empowerment and institutional change in defense of women's rights are discussed. Chilean women participated in the United Nations International Women's Conferences that accompanied the Decade of Women between 1975 and 1985. They also joined regional feminist conferences called Encounters, Encuentros, which were explicitly aimed at convening women in the Americas. Chilean women's experience of international solidarity and exile encouraged many to reconsider their own roles in their native society. In the course of military rule and re-democratization, Chilean feminists connected these experiences to domestic feminist activism and set a path for empowerment that fitted their national historical trajectory. - Existe(n) una(s) nueva(s) derecha(s) en Chile?Bustamante Olguín, Fabián
InterCAmbio (Universidad de Costa Rica. Programa de Investigación Producciones Culturales Centroamericanas y Caribeñas), 2023, Vol.20 (1), p.e54336
El propósito de este artículo es hacer una reflexión teórica contingente acerca de si la “nueva derecha” que está emergiendo en la actualidad es radical o simplemente una continuación de la derecha chicago gremialista que ha sido hegemónica en estos últimos años en la historia política reciente en Chile. Para discutir los límites de las derechas, sus particularidades y aspectos analíticos, se utiliza una bibliografía especializada sobre las derechas en Chile y en el extranjero. En este artículo sugerimos que las derechas se caracterizaron por la hibridación ideológica, cuya característica axial es la co-presencia o integración dialéctica de una amplia gama de discursos de diferentes tradiciones ideológicas y de pensamiento. Al final de este escrito, se hipotetiza la posibilidad de emergencia de una derecha nacionalista mesocrática y popular comprometida con una integración nacional basada en ideales republicanos, y una derecha radical xenófoba, que fomente la adhesión a valores de exclusión ante la llegada de inmigrantes en los últimos años en Chile. - Asociacionismo y hegemonía. Concepción, Chile, 1860-1905Rojas, G M
Cuadernos de historia (Santiago, Chile), 2021 (54), p.243-262
En el último tercio del siglo XIX, el asociacionismo fue visto por los trabajadores en Chile y el extranjero como una oportunidad de mejorar sus condiciones de vida y participación dentro del Estado. A través del estudio de la ciudad de Concepción, buscamos dilucidar cómo esta forma de organización de los trabajadores se constituyó en un paradigma de modo de negociación de la población, sobrepasando el mero ámbito laboral. También sostenemos que la práctica asociacionista fortaleció la construcción de la hegemonía estatal a través del reconocimiento y legitimidad otorgada por la sociedad civil al Estado, desde una posición de subalternidad.
