The practice of memory: Decolonial resistance in indigenous Chile and the Chilean diaspora

Abstract

Through analysis of poetry, performance, and theatre – three sites in which body and text are entwined – “The Practice of Memory: Decolonial Resistance in Indigenous Chile and the Chilean Diaspora” argues that memory is a crucial site for decolonial resistance. It analyzes memorial practices in 20th and 21st century Chile and the U.S. within a continental American context. Staging a Performance Theory intervention in Memory Studies, “The Practice of Memory” identifies memory as performance revealing it as an always incomplete and repeated practice of translating experience, allowing for self-redefinition and social transformation into new, extra-national collectivities. The broader implications of this project are its effect on how we understand the relationship between contemporary Latinx and Latin American national identities and histories, specifically as their constitution emerges from an ongoing colonial project of Indigenous dispossession and Black subjugation. Through memorial performances we not only come to understand how subjugating systems such as state dictatorship, and neoliberal governance and sociality structure our every relation, but also how the decolonial potential in memory and memorial performance generates a space for living in ways that defy these systems.