Where Memory Dwells. Culture and State Violence in Chile (review)

Readers familiar with late twentieth-century Chilean political and cultural history may not find much that is new in Macarena Gómez-Barris's book. The value of this study, however, resides precisely in the way the author arranges the descriptions and analyses of previously examined social phenomena and cultural productions in a creative, often surprising, and always perceptive manner. The author thus models one of her key theoretical tenets: that social phenomena, ideas about nationhood, citizenship, political identifications, and all manner of social practices are neither stable nor static, but are constantly renewed, transformed, erased, and put back into circulation as valid, often competing currencies of signification. Memory has the ability to affect the ways in which this process of social construction occurs and to infuse the present with an array of historical and political meanings.

Gómez-Barris contends centrally, with Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, that collective memory does not reside in the nebulous realm of people's minds but in the concrete social spaces, particularly those related to representation, available to a collective as resources for remembering. With this in mind, the author chooses a very heterogeneous set of cultural productions that allow her to investigate the unique ways in which Chilean society has dealt with, or failed to deal with, the aftermath of the political violence generated by the Pinochet dictatorship, continuing well into the years of Chile's transition to democracy and forward to the election as president of Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture survivor and the daughter of an Air Force general who died in captivity in 1974. In Gómez-Barris's own words, she focuses on what she calls "sites of ruptured memory, and the process of rescue, transmutation, and recovery" (p. 11) that can be evinced from them.

The heart of the book is devoted to describing and explicating the significance of three widely different objects of study. First comes Villa Grimaldi, the secret detention center that operated from 1974 to 1978 as home for the Metropolitan Brigade of the National Directorate of Intelligence (DINA). The remnants of the former torture center became a memorial park for human rights victims in 1997. Then Gómez-Barris turns her attention to documentaries, featuring readings of films like Silvio Caiozzi's Fernando ha vuelto (1998) and others by Patricio Guzmán, particularly La memoria obstinada (1998) and El caso Pinochet (2002). Next in the list of representations studied in this book are the paintings of Chilean artist Guillermo Núñez, who devoted the great part of his artistic project to the problematics of memory; the representations of violence, social and individual trauma; and the politics of arts in the context of authoritarian rule. Attention then turns to the cultural productions related to memory and identity by Chilean exiles, focusing on the work done by artists and culture workers in the San Francisco Bay area.

Recent events in Chile demonstrate the importance and the relevance of examining the cluster of social phenomena that compose the country's historical memory. Historical memory of the recent past, including the dictatorship, continues to be contested at all levels, from the proposed relabeling by the current rightist administration of the Pinochet government as "military regime," replacing "dictatorship" in elementary-school history textbooks, to the widely successful television series Los ochenta and Los archivos del Cardenal, not to mention a host of documentary and fiction films that confront both the content and processes of collective memory. In this fluid context, Gómez-Barris's contribution is valuable because of her attempt to bring into the discussion widely dissimilar modes of representation. In particular, the analysis and reflections generated by the exile experience deserve particular attention and will hopefully be developed further by the author or others.

In a book so dependent on nuance and detail, it is striking to find a few inaccuracies, some of them not insignificant: within the...