A complex portrait of postdictatorial Chile by one of that country's most incisive cultural critics, this book uses memoirs, photographs, the plastic arts, novels, and other texts--the "residues" of a culture--to analyze the political-cultural Chilean landscape in the wake of Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year military rule. Such residual areas reveal the flaws and lapses in Chile's transition from violent military dictatorship to electoral democracy. Nelly Richard's analysis ranges from an exploration of false memories of the recent past--especially memories of violence--to a discussion of...

Through the dimensions of aesthetics, culture, and politics, Richard (cultural studies, U. Arcis, Santiago, Chile) analyzes certain zones of tension and conflict in Chile resulting from the democratic transition process. He finds the zones to be more or less residual, pointing to unstable formations of symbolic and cultural deposits and sedimentati