Neoliberal transitions: the Santiago general cemetery and the affective economies of counter-revolution

Abstract

Anchored in the Santiago General Cemetery, this essay analyses the management of revolutionary memory under neoliberalism. Juxtaposing the gravesites of Salvador Allende and Víctor Jara, I theorise the gendered and racialised processes through which collective dreams for justice – and even radical politics themselves – come to be co-opted under neoliberal capitalism. If in Jara’s grave we see the state performing the part of the hyper-masculine disciplinarian father, I argue, in Allende’s grave we witness the state as the begrudgingly accepting father, ready to take in the repentant children back into the nation, in exchange for obedience. Finally, I turn to alternative memorialisation practices performed by the nation’s discontents, and namely ongoing struggles for collective self-determination and decolonisation. Ultimately, I situate critiques of neoliberalism in Chile in dialogue with intersectional queer and transnational feminist scholarship on the seductive logics of neoliberalism – and emergent forms of justice that appear just beyond its purview.

Keywords:

• (counter)revolution
• memory
• affective economies
• violence and justice
• Chile

Acknowledgements

I thank Keith Feldman, Carl Fischer, Michael Lazzara, Alison Merz, Lupe Arenillas, Magalí Rabasa, Marcela Fuentes and Heather Turcotte for reading and commenting on this essay. I also thank Anna Agathangelou, Angela Davis, Juan Poblete, Lisa Rofel and Neferti Tadiar for responding to this piece when it was a part of my dissertation. Lastly, I thank the co-editors and anonymous reviewers of this issue for their insightful reflections and comments, all of which helped me to sharpen my arguments.

Notes

1. 1. Please note that the following analysis focuses upon Bachelet, not to single her out, but because it was written in 2009 in direct response to the contemporaneous political debates.

2. 2. For more on state violence as performative, please see Anderson and Menon (2009).

3. 3. Golpe comes from the verb golpear: to smash, hit or shatter. Diamela Eltit has written about this. For further analysis, see Spira (2011).

4. 4. As Joan Jara puts it ‘I left Chile a month after the coup and there I left (Víctor). But … (everyone) told me what was happing with his tomb: many people came to visit him, including someone who made a space to place flowers. And, between the flowers, they would leave little papers with poems … There exists a testimony to these thirty-five years in which the Chilean people have not forgotten Victor … . [I]n the cemetery there is rich neighborhood and there are poblaciones. Víctor is with those with whom he always was: in the población.’ Joan Jara (2009)

5. 5. Jara’s grave is close both to the MIR’s (the armed revolutionary left party) martyred leader Miguel Enríquez, and patio 29.

6. 6. This was particularly the case under Bachelet when moderate reforms were introduced to improve the social safety net (in terms of early childhood education and healthcare). Yet, far from breaking from neoliberal ideologies, such practices of incorporating small changes served to insulate capitalism’s very structures.

7. 7. Importantly, this continues the legacy of the Concertación, starting with Patricio Aylwin, a Christian democrat who many blame for defecting from Allende when the party supported military intervention in 1973.

8. 8. An important body of social-psychological work has documented the cumulative effects of ‘cultures of fear’ in Chile. Norbert Lechher (1992) argued that in the post-dictatorship, people would more easily identify with the state and treat other citizens as enemy ‘others’ because they had grown accustomed to a paternal state power. See also the work of Elizabeth Lira and the organisation, CINTRAS (Centro de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos).

9. 9. I thank Nancy Postero for pointing me to Schild’s critical analysis.

10. 10. For more on the after the fact construction of Latin American revolutionaries as ‘childish’ and ‘pathological’, please see Beverly (2009).

11. 11. Here, I include the racialised underclass whose condition has been exacerbated by the prison-industrial-complex, a network of technologies of incarceration that warehouse entire populations deemed ‘expendable’ to global capital. It is no coincidence that this global architecture of confinement emerged in the wake of the Third World movements who dared to dream of a world outside of the vestiges of colonialism, racism and imperialism. Please see Angela Davis (2004) and Julia Sudbury (2005).

12. 12. Out of synch with its surrounding patios, Allende’s grave is renumbered 39 – perhaps a gesture of solidarity.

13. 13. Please see Richard (2010) for a reading of the aesthetics of memorialisation reflecting neoliberal consensus.

14. 14. For an excellent overview of these arguments, please see Nelson (2002) and Gómez-Barris (2008).

15. 15. For more on white racial mythologies in Chile, please see Beckman (2009).

16. 16. I thank Michael Lazzara for providing these photos.

17. 17. This was the only military prison in Chile in which all prisoners were murdered.

18. 18. Excellent work has been done on performance as a lens for reading memorialisation practices in the cemetery. Please see, for example, Del Campo (2004), Lazzara (2006) and Taylor (2009).

19. 19. I thank Carl Fischer for this transcription.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tamara Lea Spira

TAMARA LEA SPIRA is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon and a Beatrice Bain Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.