Memory Scripts in the Making: Chile’s 9/11 and the Struggle for Meaning. A Review of Steve J. Stern's <em>Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988</em> (Durham: Duke UP, 2006)

Authors

  • Michael Lazzara University of California—Davis

Keywords:

Latin American History, Latin American Politics

Abstract

Stern gives us a keen sense of the ideological polarization of Chile during the Pinochet years, but does so while specifically teasing out the notion of memory and the dynamics of how competing memory scripts about Pinochet’s golpe de estado were forged, consolidated, and modified. In this sense, his book affords readers more than a simple factual rendering of what happened in Chile; it allows them an understanding of the very emergence of memory as a culturally significant and politically contested concept—a concept that Chileans discovered and learned to deploy over time (and out of necessity) and that eventually offered a guiding theoretical paradigm for their own acts of historical self-reflection and political activism.

Author Biography

Michael Lazzara, University of California—Davis

Michael J. Lazzara obtuvo su doctorado en la Universidad de Princeton y es actualmente profesor de literatura y cultura latinoamericanas en la Universidad de California en Davis. Es autor de Diamela Eltit: conversación en Princeton (Princeton:PLAS, 2002), Los años de silencio: conversaciones con narradores chilenos que escribieron bajo dictadura (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2002), Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), y de artículos publicados en revistas como Chasqui y Revista de crítica cultural. Prepara actualmente, con Vicky Unruh, un volumen titulado Telling Ruins in Latin America, a ser publicado por Palgrave en 2008.

Published

2007-08-01

How to Cite

Lazzara, M. (2007). Memory Scripts in the Making: Chile’s 9/11 and the Struggle for Meaning. A Review of Steve J. Stern’s <em>Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988</em> (Durham: Duke UP, 2006). A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 5(1), 243–252. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/364

Issue

Section

Reviews: Testimonios