Memoria, resistencia y posnacionalismo en La bandera de Chile de Elvira Hernández

Abstract

Throughout 1981, the Chilean poet Elvira Hernández wrote La bandera de Chile which was published a decade later, due the political context of those years. The entire work represents a poetic effort to dismantle the traditional meaning of a symbol clearly related to the notion of national identity. This fact allows the work to be read as a cultural product that confronts the dictatorial regimen of Augusto Pinochet, constituting, therefore, a work of resistance. In addition to that, precisely because it may be understood as a literary witness of its time, La bandera de Chile should be read as a work bent on the theme of memory. In this article I analyze this double implication and I will relate it with the very notion of postnational culture, since the work advocates a reading that deconstruct the traditional manner in which the concept of nation is discursively built.