Speculative Fictions: Chilean Culture, Economics, and the Neoliberal Transition

Acknowledgments

vii The ground for this project was prepared at least as far back as 1995 at a conference in Santiago that Alberto Moreiras participated in while I was a student at the Universidad de Chile. The talk Alberto gave is now a widely cited and influential piece of the postdictatorship archive, and it proved to be particularly influential for me because it motivated me to go to North Carolina to study with him. I thank him for his mentorship and for being a model of intellectual generosity. The book itself materialized in a context that I remember fondly as being charged with intense debates, workshops, collaborations, frenzied readings, and late-night conversations. The following people helped me think through the problems I explore in this book: Idelber Avelar, Jon Beasley-Murray, John Beverley, Oscar Cabezas, Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby, Ariel Dorfman, Patrick Dove, Federico Galende, Kate Jenckes, Adriana Johnson, John Kraniauskas, Marta HernándezSalv án, Horacio Legrás, Ryan Long, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Juan Poblete, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Freya Schiwy, Willy Thayer, Teresa Vilarós, Gareth Williams, and Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott. Two other groups made key intellectual contributions to this project . I am grateful to the members of the John Hope Franklin Seminar “Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory” (Srinivas Aravamudan, Ian Baucom, J. Kameron Carter, Sheila Dillon, Grant Farred, ThavoacknowledgmentS lia Glymph, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Charles Piot, Leigh Raiford , Stephane Robolin, and Susan Thorne), who, among other things, helped me see that I had become too comfortable in my area studies perspective. My colleagues at the University of California Riverside, Susan Antebi, Jodi Kim, Miriam Lam, Vorris Nunley, and Freya Schiwy, provided much-needed feedback at a crucial moment in the book’s development. I will always be grateful to Freya and Cassandra, who not only endured my moods while I was writing this book but made life wonderful . This book is dedicated to my parents and my grandmother Victoria Batista Reed. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Speculative Fictions ...