Schoolhouse Politics: Writing and Dissent in Dictatorship

This presentation forms part of current research and writing into my second book, which advances my interest in the cultural and political history of Chile’s dictatorship (1973-1990), but pivots to investigate the radical practice of writing in repression. The book project explores the politics of writing and re-writing—of producing, circulating, and reading text in a political context defined by censorship, silence, erasure, and exile. In five related chapters, this book explores the complex practice of writing as dissent: in detention or incarceration; in the schoolhouse; in the street; in exile; and in clandestine archives. This presentation focuses on schoolhouse writing—exploring the schoolhouse as a complex space of childhood writings, which range from official or institutional forms of writing and record keeping, to myriad forms of writing as activism. I argue that schoolhouses became rich, multigenerational public spheres of dissent, part of a complex, diverse array of textual practices with which the nation’s citizens, and especially its youngest citizens, built creative political identities, communities, and methodologies.