Session Abstract

This panel features exciting new research on how Chilean histories have been elaborated through transnational circulations of ideas, commodities, and people across the Americas.  It considers how histories of a particular “place” (Chile) may be made outside the geographical imaginary of that place as well as by processes that traverse through multiple places of “nation” or “region.” Several of the presentations address how “Chilean history” has been shaped by experiences and transformations inside the United States and, in turn, how Chileans and debates about Chile created “American history.”  Other papers consider Chile’s formation by transnational flows between South American and Caribbean spaces.

In recent years, scholars of Latin America have urged a shift away from cold war area studies models that emphasize the fundamental difference between “North” and “South” American histories. They also have challenged essentialist distinctions between particular national experiences (“Argentina,” “Brazil,” “Cuba,” “Mexico”). Scholars have argued for transnational paradigms that more fully consider the connections, conflict, and mutual influences which both cut across national and regional borders, and which constitute those particular national and regional places as “distinct” (“Chile,” “South America”).  Although important transnational work is being done on almost all national and regional fields, this panel intentionally focuses on histories of Chile in order to make our interrogation of  “place, lives, and (hi)stories” more specific and thorough.  This focus, paradoxically, should make the panel more useful and interesting to those who are not scholars of Chile or Latin America.  Chile’s claims to “exceptionalism” have long relied on arguments about Chile’s peculiar geographic configuration and isolation-- an argument that is hardly exclusive to Chile.  Likewise, Chile has often been touted as a “model” for studying a range of phenomenon—political stability, liberal democracy, socialism, authoritarianism, neo-liberalism.  This panel’s exploration of transnational methodologies to locate Chilean histories within broader hemispheric and global processes reframes questions of national uniqueness in ways that are relevant to scholars of many other places. The panel’s geographical focus highlights methodology as the main topic of discussion. Presentations address topics from both the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Panelists include a diversity of participants, including scholars professionally located both in Latin America and in the United States, and from a range of public and private universities.