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Luis Roniger, Leonardo Senkman, Saúl Sosnowski and Mario Sznajder, Exile, Diaspora, and Return: Changing Cultural Landscapes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. ix + 292, £47.99, hb
This book represents an ambitious multidisciplinary effort by a sociologist, a historian, a political scientist, and a literary scholar. The four set out on a voyage that looks at the entire cycle of political exiles from the military regimes of South America, especially in the 1970s and 1980s: the social–political–economic circumstances that drove thousands of Argentines, Chileans, Paraguayans and Uruguayans out of their home countries; their reception in the host countries and their efforts at social integration; the formation of exile communities and diaspora politics; the personal decision to go back and the policies of return adopted by the new democratic regimes; and the exiles’ contribution to the democratisation of their home countries at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, especially in Chile and Uruguay.
The volume is the culmination of the scholarly trajectory of its authors, who have published extensively on the topics of Latin American political exiles, displaced persons, politics of exclusion, the legacy of authoritarianism and the violation of human rights. Four countries are the focus of this research, with Paraguay, whose process of territorial displacement had started already in the 1950s, receiving the necessary attention that it seldom receives in the English-language historiography. Not all issues mentioned in the first chapter are discussed as intensely as others, but the end result is a fascinating analysis of...