LACS Public Issues Forum

Co-sponsored by Cornell Cinema, Literatures in English and Creative Writing, History of Art and Visual Studies, Performance and Media Arts, Romance Studies, and Society of the Humanities

Roundtable with Roberto Brodsky, Denisa Jashari, Kenneth Roberts, and Camilo Trumper moderated by Raymond Craib on Chile, the Unidad Popular, and the coup d’etat of 1973.

Writer and current Faculty Adjunct at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, Roberto Brodsky is the author of six fiction novels published in Chile and Spain, along with two essay volumes, Adiós a Bolaño (2018) and The Missing House. Enrique Lihn in the 80s (2021). A professional journalist for 40 years with broad experience in magazines and newspapers, he is also the scriptwriter of major Latin American films such as Machuca (2004), El Brindis (2007), and Mi vida con Carlos (2008). His most recent book, Balas perdidas ("Lost Bullets"), released by Rialta Publishers in September 2023 in Mexico, assembles chronicle pieces and articles written over the last 30 years about the coup d’état in Chile in 1973.

Raymond Craib is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke UP, 2004), The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), and most recently Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).

Denisa Jashari is Assistant Professor of Latin American history at Syracuse University. Jashari’s book, tentatively titled, “Santiago’s Urban Battleground: Space and the Production of the Working Poor,” is a social and urban history of twentieth century Santiago, Chile. Jashari’s articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, and A contracorriente. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in 2020 and was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Kenneth M. Roberts is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University. His teaching and research interests explore the politics of inequality in Latin America and beyond. His published works include Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era and Deepening Democracy: The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru. His current research explores polarization and democracy in contemporary Latin American politics.

Camilo Trumper is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), with a specialization in urban and visual culture and the cultural history of political change in Chile. His first book, Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile (The University of California Press, 2016), is a cultural history of political change in late twentieth-century Chile. Ephemeral Histories is a study of the myriad ways in which traditionally marginalized individuals claimed city spaces as a political act. Their often-fleeting forms of urban and visual practice generated new ways of acting on and thinking about the city as a space of fluid democratic debate and a stage for creative political citizenship in democracy and dictatorship. His second book project, “Writing in Dictatorship: Politics, Exile, and Archives in Chile,1973-1990,” explores the multiple practices of writing to offer new insight into the everyday experience of power and contest under Pinochet in Chile and abroad. “Writing in Dictatorship” maps the connection between distinct forms of dissent, in Chile and in exile, that were tied together by the political practice of writing, by the line of the pen. Defining writing capaciously and creatively, it explores often-clandestine, often-unspectacular forms of political organizing and association that Chilean citizens built immediately after the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. It looks, in five different chapters at multiple places and practices of writing as dissent—prison writing; schoolhouse writing; writing on the street; writing in exile; and archival writing practices.