Moving Memory

Moving Memory is an ethnography of remembrance in the field of tension between post-dictatorship Chile and occupied Palestine that offers new insights into memory politics as a globally resurgent and increasingly transnational phenomenon. It tells a largely untold story of a Palestinian diaspora: how a predominantly Christian, conservative, and wealthy elite has come to form the backbone of a diasporic community to which the Palestinian struggle remains a central mobilizing force. Schwabe explores how Palestinian diaspora politics play into larger attempts to obscure the recent Chilean past and its consequences, all the while working to counter Zionist efforts to negate and erase Palestinian existence. Despite considerable efforts to contain them, memories move. They travel across porous and ever-changing geographical and socio-political boundaries, reconfiguring realities in the process. In exploring the paradoxes of remembering and forgetting between Palestine and Chile as intertwining nodes in the complex field of global memory politics, the book demarcates the limits and possibilities of forging solidarity at the fault lines of memory.