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)
Keywords
Latin American History, Latin American Politics
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.
Published
2007-08-01
Section
Reviews: Testimonios