Fugitive Song: The Performance of the Disappeared (Chile, 1973-1988)

Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America, edited by Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers), 2010

Examines a concert staged in Chile by the Cuban cantautor Silvio Rodríguez in light of Jacques Derridas notion of "event" elaborated in Specters of Marx. It suggests that, while it is entirely possible to see the concert as an event whose "event-ness" is created post facto, it is also useful to posit the concert as part of a construction of a larger process, that of opposition to the "event" of authoritarianism. Discusses two songs, Víctor Jara's "Te recuerdo Amanda" and Rodríguez's "Unicornio", reflecting on their evocations of death and disappearance. Death, as evoked in the Jara song, at least bears the comfort of a tangible end image; disappearance, as "Unicornio" bears witness, denies closure. These recorded performances are further considered in the light of their afterlife as concert performances and the subjects of cover versions and tributes that all contribute to the counter-event suggested by the Rodríguez concert.

Body between Materiality and Power: Essays in Visual Studies, 2016

Chasqui, 2004

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Twentieth-Century Music, 2023

This article is a study of Chilean popular music produced during the 1990s, the first decade following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. The return of democracy and a period of strong economic growth contributed to a boom in the Chilean music industry. A wealth of music was recorded and the opportunities for listening to live music multiplied. The article's main objectives are to illuminate the ways in which Chilean popular music addressed democracy's inspiring promises and frustrating limits and to consider how Chileans used popular music to foster new post-authoritarian identities. First, it argues that music was used to reclaim national symbols that had been coopted by the dictatorship. Second, it considers the music of two generations of musicians who returned to the country after living in exile. Finally, it focuses on punk and hip-hop, the styles that produced the most significant examples of protest music in the post-authoritarian period.

History and Anthropology, 2023

In this paper I explore two approaches to what lies 'unearthed' in Chile's recent violent histories. In the first instance, I explore the effort towards the obfuscation or intertitialization of knowledge by the Chilean state, regarding the Pinochet dictatorship years. The argument in the first half of the paper underlines the need to understand recent Chilean history in relation to explicit efforts at 'disappearing' historyat the purposeful obfuscation of deathly experiences and the limbo these generate. In the second half, I explore the idea that in the 'negative' space afforded by the circumstantial and historical possibilities of locales of political interest, where traumatic history is only partially understood, or not recognized, paranormal investigators expand, rather than contract, possibilities within this negative. I use negative theology, a medieval counter-orthodox current of writing about the unspeakable, to explore how, in contrast to the Chilean state from 1973 to 1990, which receded into the darkness of negation, paranormal investigators take impetus from this darkness and transform it into a version of history proper, ontologizing the negative as they proceed. Their endeavours thus become quasicosmogonic, in theological terms.

Violence: Un International Journal, 2023

This article presents an empirical and theoretical analysis of the relationship between the experience of a loved one's political disappearance at a personal level and as a public and political problem in Chile. It discusses two ways of generalizing disappearance into a problem that goes beyond those directly involved or affected. First, using the concepts of "public problem" and "montée en généralité" (generalization process), it analyzes the relationship between individual and collective action in order to describe how the families of the disappeared transform it into a public issue. This is referred to as "generic generalization" since it draws individual cases together into one general category of denunciation. Second, based on Wittgenstein's metaphor of "family resemblances," the article examines other ways of publicizing the disappearance in which the political aspect of the problem does not necessarily obliterate its personal nature for the families but juxtaposes the personal and the public. The article defines these as "sense generality." The research upon which this theoretical article is based includes ethnographic interviews and analysis of the discourse found in historical documents.

South American Quarterly, 2024

Ricardo is a thirty-eight-year-old emergency medical technician from Santiago. During the 2019 social uprising, he lived in a central neighborhood close to the epicenter of the protests. He worked at a local clinic attached to a public university, where student protests and clashes between masked demonstrators and police were common. Ricardo comes from a right-wing family: only he and his sister have left-wing leanings. He has never been a member of a political party, group, or organization, and in fact he expresses mistrust of them, and of Chilean politics in general. However, the neighborhood he lived in as a child bordered on another, Villa Francia, which has a long history of political and community organizing and is considered a combative place. Ricardo used to go there to get involved in protests on emblematic days.1 A few years ago, he began to take part on and off in a musical troupe that often appears at popular street events and commemorations of September 11, the date of Pinochet’s coup d’état. In Ricardo’s account, two main hermeneutical and agential phenomena configured the uprising as a critical event with the capacity for political subjectivation.2 First, Ricardo’s identification of the revolt as a historical event from his own lifetime, as he drew parallels between the social uprising and the 1973–90 dictatorship, the biggest sociopolitical catastrophe of Chile’s recent history. Second, the power of the masses in public demonstrations, which activated Ricardo’s desire and spurred him on to a total and systematic immersion in the front line of the protests,3 evoking memories of the urban street fights he knew in his childhood. Once the dictatorship was over, Ricardo and his friends had repeatedly asked themselves, “What would I have done if I’d been there?” Faced with the social uprising, at first an unintelligible event, Ricardo returns to, and brings into the present, that generation-specific question: “Where am I going to be now?” His response rose to the occasion: an extraordinary level of immersion in, and by means of, street combat. The memory of the anti-dictatorship movement, the power of the spontaneous masses, and the street as a place of encounter and struggle will activate Ricardo’s political subjectivation, and the configuration of the uprising as a critical event, one that he interprets in the light of the past. Some academic accounts of Chile’s social uprising refer to the “irruption of memories” through this protest cycle. These may be long-standing memories—such as of the violence visited on the Mapuche people4 by the Chilean state—memories of the feminist or neighborhood movements, and/ or memories of the recent dictatorship (Angelcos and Pérez 2017; Vivaldi and Sepúlveda 2021; Garcés 2019; Han 2012). Certainly, the repressive policing of the protests, and the decreeing of “states of exception” revived memories of the dictatorship the length and breadth of the country. The protests became places of commemoration and homage to victims of dictatorship-era violence, and spaces in which to denounce remaining gaps in truth and justice. The demands that inspired the uprising also referred back to the period of the political transition (1990s), which had first denounced the legacy of the neoliberal societal model imposed at gunpoint under the military regime. The relationship between these memorialization practices and new processes of political subjectivation however remains unexplored, above all among actors who do not belong to political and protest movements such as the student, feminist, or environmental movements (Bravo and Pérez 2022). In this context, Ricardo’s case demonstrates the intergenerational staying power of certain subterranean memories in the trajectories of people who either did not live through the dictatorship or lived it as children and do not have a history of activism or involvement in social organizations. Decades later, during the social uprising, memories of resistance to the dictatorship evoked an ethical imperative in this ordinary citizen. Ricardo experiences this as a form of duty to his time and to his own history. This experience blurs the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics, as it becomes the engine of mobilization and a desire for social transformation not through political militancy or trajectories, but rather in unexpected and sudden awakenings and agency arrangements.

2018