Friday February 14th, 10am, History Conference Room 529

Janey Fellow Manuela Badilla Rajevic presents her most recent work based on the 2013/2014 Janey Summer Fellowship she was awarded. See title and abstract below:

Manuela Badilla Rajevic: Dissident Memories beyond the Transition to Democracy: The Chilean Postmemory Experience

Abstract

More than 25 years after the end of the Chilean military dictatorship, the memories from this period are still controversial. The transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one has successfully constructed an official narrative of the past that recognizes and condemns the gross human rights violations committed during the dictatorship. The political authorities and social organizations involved in this transitional process have employed a number of different transitional justice strategies, such as truth commissions, material and symbolic reparations to victims and memorialization initiatives. The main goal of this process has been to achieve national reconciliation in order to rebuild and maintain democratic order. However, in the construction of this new discourse of the past, dissident memories have been excluded and, nowadays, the ideas of reconciliation and democracy are permanently being challenged. This has been particularly interesting in the case of a postmemory generation, a Marianne Hirsch’s concept to describe the memory processes of people who did not personally experience a traumatic past. This has been the case with ‘The Day of the Young Combatant’, when many young people commemorate the assassination of two young brothers during the military dictatorship, either through cultural activities or violent riots.

Although almost thirty years have passed since the murder of the Vergara Toledo brothers, this commemoration has far from decreased in intensity, evolving – within a democratic system – from a very local and unofficially recognized commemoration to mass, violent events that take place mainly in peripheral and working-class neighborhoods. This commemoration represents an impressive case of postmemory in which violence has a fundamental role, not only because of its origins in traumatic and repressive events, but also in the way these events have been transmitted.

Young people born after the end of the dictatorship are claiming a place in memory struggles. Although most of them recognize and condemn the violation of human rights during the dictatorship, they are demanding a broader understanding of what memory means. In other words, through the enactment of a dissident memory, young people from different territories and social locations are challenging the assumptions that have sustained the hegemonic transitional discourse by unveiling the symbolic and structural violence experienced in Chile today.