Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile

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 Gómez-Barris examines cultural sites and representations in postdictatorship Chile—what she calls "memory symbolics"—to uncover the impact of state-sponsored violence. She s...