Serpente, A; (2014) Diasporic Chilean and Argentinean narratives in the UK: the traces of second generation postmemory. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis analyses the interrelated concepts of diasporic postmemory and how they apply to the oral narratives of a small group of second generation Chileans and Argentineans living in the UK, whose parents were political exiles and economic migrants linked to the Chilean (1973-1990), and Argentinean (1976-1983) dictatorships. Diasporic postmemory as a ‘multidirectional’ theory is used to discuss these narratives in a ‘delocalised’ context where it is argued that two central memory fields overlap: the first being the field of the ‘politics of memory’ in the Southern Cone, and the second the ‘diaspora field’. It will be argued that these narratives occupy a mobile and situated diasporic ‘in-between’ space, indicative of ‘translocational positionalities’ that shift between a UK context and abroad. By presenting these postmemory narratives together, we can come to explore how the legacies of the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina continue to have resonances beyond the stable boundaries of the field of the politics of memory in those countries. As such, they hold the possibility to move beyond the direct victims of state terrorism and their kin, encompassing a wider ‘affective community’ of diasporic positionalities and subjectivities tied to wider societal responses to the legacy of state terrorism and trauma. Furthermore, I will also discuss how in this diaspora space, the positionalities of the researcher and interviewees are intertwined, and form part of subjectivities that can become ethical and reflexive subjects of postmemory, in mutually articulating alternative possibilities for more diversified and collective forms of multidirectional memories to emerge.

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