This article analyses the commemoration of political violence and its victims in the aftermath of the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973—90). We assess the varied political processes involved in commemoration, and we identify those whose struggles to reclaim sites and spaces associated with past human rights violations represent a new political, and in some cases antipolitical, repertoire. We also examine shifts in official stances and action regarding human rights and political commemoration.

Avery Gordon’s work exceeds the limits of disciplinary boundaries and so does her practice. She uses the term ‘itinerant’ to describe her strategies of inhabiting multidisciplinary spaces and of critiquing the worlds, peripheries and fractures produced by racial capitalism. Gordon moves as an intellectual itinerant, creating multidirectional and interdisciplinary dialogues as a sociology scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, while also collaborating with artist. Since 1997, Gordon speaks as a public intellectual on her KCSB FM radio programme, ‘No Alibis’, co-hosted with Elizabeth Robinson. She is also a visiting professor at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. In the tradition of critical thinkers, Gordon’s work starts from a sense of urgency, exposed and developed in different ways in her major works, including her path-breaking book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press), her teaching and writing on prisons and the carceral system, and her most recent book The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (Fordham University Press). In January 2018, we invited Gordon to Santiago, Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, to deliver the talk, ‘Pensar desde los Márgenes Utópicos/Haunted Futures: The Utopian Margins’. Gordon also took a guided visit through Chile’s Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional/National Stadium National Memory site. Here is an extended conversation on the topics that frame her work, like ghosts, haunting and utopia, and on questions that emerge from the memory studies field and that are of concern to our special issue.

Based on a study of the 1960s generation of Chilean left-wing leaders, this article offers a three-dimensional model of individual political identity to examine how leaders justify their contributions to society and the political programmes of which they are a part. The central dimension of individual political identity is that of cognitive frameworks, that is, individuals' fundamental approaches to politics, rooted in the values they assign to ideas, political organisation and their relationships to fellow political leaders and activists. The article identifies four cognitive ideal-types: political party loyalists, personal loyalists, political thinkers and political entrepreneurs. The article concludes that the conceptualisation of individual political identity is a powerful explanatory framework for understanding the formulation and reformulation of political thinking and action, particularly in periods in which political institutions are in a state of flux or crisis.

In the rich and varied work of memory studies, scholars have turned to exploring the meanings that different communities assign to the past, the social mediations of memories, as well as how the memories of subaltern subjects re-signify the relationship between history and memory. This special issue explores the ever present dynamics of unwieldy pasts through what have been termed “the spectral turn” and “the forensic turn.” We argue that specters (which appear in the literature as ghosts, or as haunting) and exhumations defy notions of temporality or resolution. Both trace the social dynamics that redefine the meanings of the past and that voice suffering, expose institutions’ limits, reveal disputes, explore affect and privilege political resistance. They draw from significant intellectual traditions across disciplinary and thematic boundaries in the natural and social sciences, the humanities, art and fiction. Their intellectual subjects range from work that explores the political struggles of confronting slavery and the possibility of reparations in the Americas long after it was formally abolished, to sensitive treatments of graves of Franco’s Spain. We suggest that both the spectral turn and the forensic turn have provided lenses to conceptualize the social life of unwieldy pasts, by exploring its dynamics, practices, and the cultural transmissions. They have also offered a language to communities that mobilize the political strength of resentment, deepened by the late phase of global capitalism and its consequent, deepening inequalities.

Almost all agree that political systems in Latin America underwent a transformation in the 1980s. The usual quick description of this change was ‘democratization’. But whether one takes an optimistic or a pessimistic view of the level of democracy that was achieved, one thing was sure—the traditional forms of participation by, and representation of, the poor, the working population, and others structurally disadvantaged had changed. The chapters examine the labour organizations, political parties, indigenous and environmental groups that have emerged, sometimes amidst new forms of violence. Others recount efforts to rebuild social–democratic projects and to create new models of participatory politics in municipalities and around social programmes. There is no consensus on whether these new forms will produce more democracy. Rather, the chapters present a variety of conceptual tools to identify trends and assess their impact.