In Process: Amy Lind with Macarena Gómez-Barris

Join us for a works-in-progress seminar of Amy Lind's "A Future of the Past: Feminist Memory Politics and State Resistance in Postdictatorship Chile" with invited interloutor Macarena Gómez-Barris. Advanced registration required to receive the draft for discussion 1 week before the event. Space is limited.

A Future of the Past: Feminist Memory Politics and State Resistance in Postdictatorship Chile

This paper serves as an introductory chapter to my book, Memory Matters: The Feminist Politics of Memory, Resistance, and Coloniality in Postdictatorship Chile (working title). In this paper, I situate my analysis of decolonial feminist memory politics as they have been represented, and often resignified, in recent 50th Anniversary (2023) memorializations of the 9/11/73 military coup in Chile, and in contemporary street mobilizations and visual politics. I emphasize how Chilean feminist scholars have developed a broad theory of violence and power as embedded in affect, space, political economy, and the coloniality of power in everyday life. I ask, how do nationalist memories of the past – as invoked in feminist politics and cultural production – inform, impede, and sometimes transform contemporary understandings of the nation’s future? I weave personal storytelling into a broader analysis of memory politics, thus taking up questions of method, interpretation, viewpoint, and truth.

Amy Lind is a 2024-25 Taft Center Fellow and a scholar of politics and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She has specialized in Andean politics and epistemes, global governance, international political economy, critical development studies, transnational feminisms, and queer/cuir decolonial and indigenous studies. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements and the Politics of Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State Press 2005) and editor of four anthologies including Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge 2010). She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and editorials, including a forthcoming chapter on plurinational politics in Ecuador in María Lugones and Patrick Crowley, eds. Decolonial Thinking: Resistant Meanings and Communal Other-Sense (Indiana UP 2025). Currently she is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Chair of Modern Culture and Media, and Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. She is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press. Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She is the author of dozens of essays and curatorial events. She was founder and director of Global South Center, NYC.

Host or Publisher Taft Research Center