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This chapter analyzes the 1937 Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art.” It argues that “Degenerate Art” needs to be understood not (only) as pointing forward to the genocidal policies of the 1940s but back to the period of history—Weimar Republic Germany—from which the Nazis claim to have saved the German people. The works on display in “Degenerate Art” are not meant to present the Germans with the face of a Jewish alien other but to teach them to find abject their own past Judaized selves.

This chapter explores the exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America (CBAA), held at the Whitney Museum. The CBAA was the work of a white man, Whitney's curator, Robert M. “Mac” Doty. It presented dissident artists as, in every sense, a creation of the society they occupied. It offered a lens through which to discern the contested and dynamic nature of the terrain on which stoic formations of blackness were then being established. The CBAA has virtually no art history because it went against pretty much everything about the art's interactions with color and race that gets to be historical. This is why it is so hard to accommodate to social histories of the period that would content themselves to rehash the old antagonisms. However, within the special confines of CBAA, the modernist project and that of interracialization regained a vitality whose loss had seemed assured for some time.

This chapter focuses on the representations and activities of those who fled Chile between 1973 and 1989 because of dictatorship repression and threats. Chileans fled to multiple destinations, including other Latin American nations, such as Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, and especially Mexico, which took in thousands of political exiles. Other nations also accepted them, including Canada, Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and, to a lesser degree, the United States. The structure of understanding and identifying with exiles contributes to important work in the social world, particularly through cultural memory, even though compulsory exile from Chile ended in 1990. The chapter analyzes an early documentary by Marilú Mallet entitled Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1987) and Patricio Guzmán's The Pinochet Case (2001), both exemplary of the condition, perspective, and interactions of exiles. Within the historical context of peñas (events by cultural centers), it also discusses an art exhibit and project on the politics of memory titled “Two 9/11s in a Lifetime,” an effort organized by a group of Chilean exiles in San Francisco.