Mapuche mnemonics: Beyond modernity’s violence

Abstract

The recent, spectacularly massive student marches in Chile have in some ways occluded Andean regional responses to extractive neoliberalism over the last 40 years. If we consider native subjectivity and the longer periodization of colonialism, then a different conceptualization and analysis of memory and subjugation emerge to complicate the field of memory and cultural studies. In this article, I analyze modern state violence through the “reducciones” period and post-1990 movement of “democratic transition” as two instances of acute racial capitalism and formulations of resistance by Mapuche peoples. Here, I wish to address what genealogy of cultural studies makes sense for understanding the long arc of colonial memory and paradigms of indigenous resistance. As such, my article tries to theoretically address possible future directions of memory studies in the Americas.