Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? The Story of Jacob Walker "El Diablo con Pistola" is a fiction but Jacob could have been any ones grandfather, an individual of very believable qualities, not a super hero of bronze or steel but a man who bleed when wounded, felt pain in his heart at the loss of a loved one or a need for revenge when those he loved were wronged.
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Here's how terms and conditions apply. To get the free app, enter mobile phone number. See all free Kindle reading apps. Don't have a Kindle? Createspace Independent Pub; 1 edition 14 June Language: Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Frustration became manifest after the national elections of and the triumph of the conservative Partido Popular, founded by ex-Franco ministers.
Emilio Silva, the founder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory ARMH , was one of the journalists who were interested in stories from the Spanish Civil War both from a personal and from a professional point of view. Indeed, the activ- ist work done by the ARMH and other grassroots organizations triggered major interest from the national and international press, and also from the world of the arts, influenc- ing theatre, documentary film, photography, visual art and literature.
With that, from onwards, the rewriting of the history of the Spanish Civil War has been a fact. Another example is the re- burial of the exhumed bodies in official cemeteries, marking relations of kinship be- tween past and future generations. This does not only refer to the transnational context of the historical event itself, but also to the transnational con- text in which recent memories are articulated.
The attempt by the Spanish court to put the former dictator on trial for war crimes marked a stark contrast with the institutionalized silence surrounding the crimes committed during the Franco-dictatorship in Spain itself. However, little attention has been paid to the role that such transnational frameworks have played in the reconfiguration of cultural memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. It is within the field of cultural remembrance, that this dissertation enters the academic debate. Each of these spaces is entangled with the Spanish memory debates in a dif- ferent way. The wars in former Yugoslavia function as a contemporary example of the devastations of a civil war, the desaparecidos of the Southern Cone as a juridical frame- work for Forced Disappearance as a crime against humanity, and, the Holocaust as an exemplary framework for the recognition and memorialization of victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Moreover, in all these three cases, the Spanish state played an active role in the recognition of the foreign victims. The three spaces have particular historical ties with Spain through histories of exile and diaspora, forms of exclusion resulting from the forging of the Spanish nation. It is important to note that all of these spaces became relevant as transnational memory discourses only after the Cold War.
As such, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance in Europe are related to the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the conception of a new united Europe. The development of the Human Rights framework forms an important background to the legal recognition of Forced Disappearance as a crime against humanity. Besides, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugo- slavia attained strong symbolical power as the first international criminal tribunal since Nuremberg. The exhumation and identification of mass graves in Bosnia has had im- portant impact on forensic anthropology worldwide.
At a time in which Spain celebrated itself as a mature democracy, these comparisons seemed to bring back the ghosts of the past. After , when the activists for historical memory were actively searching for mass graves of the civil war, Bosnia became a returning ex- ample of transitional justice. As such, the legal framework of Forced Disappearance, with its origins in memory activism in the Southern Cone, gained importance in Spain not only as a suitable framework for the Republican victims still buried in anonymous graves, but also because of the bilateral involvement in the legal recognition of this form of violence.
Finally, the Holocaust as a global and European paradigm of memory is also fre- quently used as a transnational memory framework in Spain Levy and Sznaider ; Rothberg ; A. Assmann and Conrad ; Silverman The last eyewitnesses of the events are quickly disappearing, which is spurring on memory activists to record and archive testimonies that would otherwise be lost. At the same time, it questions the ways the different scales — the local, the national, the global — are entangled and even produced through one another Jay ; De Cesari and Rigney ; A.
In this disserta- tion, I will conceive of the production of transnational memory as the outcome of an active choice of self-identification. That is, mnemonic identification is not necessarily informed by matters of generation and genealogy Appadurai ; Erll , or, in other words, we do not have to be born to a specific predefined group, such as a genera- tion cohort or a family, to identify with and adhere to specific memory cultures. However, at the same time, the prefer- ence of mnemonic affiliation is largely informed by historical and contemporary reali- ties of cultural and geographical distance and proximity.
Yet, transnational narratives always work in two or even multiple directions. Moreover, from a perspective of theories of agential realism, these narratives are deeply entangled. With that, the selection of transnational spaces that I will discuss in this dissertation, aims to show the deeper transnational entanglements in Spanish Civil War remembrance located in Spain.
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I will touch upon the influence of the Spanish Civil War in transnational memory narratives abroad more in depth in chapter 2. This proposal partly overlaps with the view of memory as a palimpsest, which invites us to think about the overlapping, and the compression and expansion of time and space, history and geography in the twenty-first century Huyssen ; Silverman That is, whereas it produces exclusions, it does not mark an absolute separation, the exclusions remain entangled within the phenomenon, which for Barad is the manifestation of multiple material-discursive practices Barad , Nowhere is the production of social exclusions as clear, as in the fabric of the mod- ern nation-state.
As I have pointed out previously, I will argue that these entangled exclusions lie at the core of the production of transnational memory. I will elaborate further on this theoretical proposal in chapter 1. However, I have not only selected works related to these three spaces, but have also included works that have had a considerable impact on the schol- arly and social debate on the remembrance of the Spanish Civil War.
As such, together these sources form a representative selection of significant Spanish articulations of transnational memory related to the memory of the Spanish Civil War. They represent the generation of militant authors who have been articulating memories of the civil war all through their careers. The journalistic archive for this period constitutes of a selection of newspaper articles. These newspaper discourses counter the militant voice of Juan Goytisolo. At the turn of the century a new generation of Spanish authors, engaged in transna- tional frameworks, embraces the topic of civil war remembrance.
Reading together-apart From the perspective of agential realism and palimpsestic memory, linear temporality and mathematical perceptions of space do not hold. Time and space compress, decom- press, expand, overlap and collapse Lefebvre ; Harvey ; Huyssen ; Barad At the same time, memory narratives include and exclude, while the excluded haunts and co-constitutes the hegemonic narrative, always ready to resurrect again.
The observer includes and excludes, but the exclusions are still there. First of all, my own selection of works produces an archive of Spanish transnational memories, which is based, however, on unavoidable exclusions that will nevertheless permeate the boundaries of the selection.
As such, the three spaces that frame the selected archive should be seen as three tempo-geographical cuts: I will analyze these three asymmetrical and heterogeneous spaces separately while also recognizing their mutual entanglements. Contrariwise, when taken individually, the different transnational contexts illuminate particular facets of the memories of the civil war as well as specific transnational genealogies and overlapping histories. The selection of these three spaces also provides a temporal cut delineating different temporal frameworks of reference.
Finally, the Holocaust as a European memory narrative is strongly related to the s, whereas the historical referent, , casts a shadow over that present. Importantly, I understand these texts as a shaping force in the construction of cultural memory Ricoeur ; Rigney ; see also Slaughter Writing, publishing and reading can then be understood as a performance of memory, a practice of making and marking space and time in society, as will be outlined more in depth in chapter 1.
The literary form offers several possibilities to explore the field of transnational memory. Literary imagination blurs the borders between imagination, memory, and history, while it also allows for an alternative construction of time and space that recog- nizes the palimpsestic nature of transnational memories Silverman ; Rothberg ; Erll a. These different voices can be related to various forms of witnessing, diverse affective relations to events from disparate times and places around the world. Barad proposes diffraction as it leads us away from thinking about homologies and analogies, and helps us to focus on specific entanglements, marking the limits of the determinacy and permanency of boundaries Barad , As for journalism, traditional media such as television and newspapers, but also various social media outlets, have played an important role in the development of the current renewed interest in the memory of the Spanish Civil War.
Media scholar Barbie Zelizer stresses the need to focus on journalism as an important actor in the construc- tion of memory. She sees journalism as one of the most influential institutions in re- cording events, providing a first draft of history, but also when it comes to remember- ing, see for instance the stress on certain commemorations in the form of lengthy back- ground articles Zelizer Furthermore, in journalism, the past is one of the biggest sources used when explaining current events, and, as such, journalism actively shapes the way we deal with and understand present events Kitch , With that, the historical comparison is one of the typical forms used in journalistic narrative, and can be successfully applied to events very distant in time, space and circumstances Edy , This is what makes news media an important vehicle for the articulation of transnational memory discourses.
Reading journalistic texts and narrative literature together-apart, can correct several restrictions of the latter.
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First of all, works related to journalism are mostly meant for broader audiences than narrative fiction, which means they can tell us something about the wider dissemination of certain transnational narratives. Secondly, as Max Weber claimed, to talk about news is to talk about politics in society Weber , 55—57; Jen- sen and Jankowski , Next to exploring the archive from the perspective of spatiotemporal cuts and read- ing together-apart journalistic and artistic sources, I will provide a close reading of how the authors as well as the characters in the novels perform a reading together-apart, as they include and exclude perspectives, geographies, and voices.
Focalization proves specifically apt when analyzing the different perspectives inherent to a text in order to identify who is doing the re- membering, and thus, who is including and excluding. Thus, focalization helps us to unravel the consciousness, in all its complexity, from which the story world is observed. Indeed, as I will argue, insight in the focalizations inherent to the text will reveal much about the purpose of transnational memory constellations.
I will include the scope of emotion and affect in my archive in order the map the subjective temporal and spatial scales of proximity and distance that give rise to the transnational field. Reading into the world of emotion and affect in the text marks an important difference between the pos- sibilities of journalistic and literary narratives.
Outline Reimagining Spain consists of five chapters. In chapter 1, I will expand on the theories that set the boundaries for my argument. I will forward the central role of different forms of witnessing, space and agency in the configurations of transnational memory. Although without providing a guarantee of reductive and instrumentalist memories, the idea here is to go beyond binary opposites and look at interconnections and entanglements.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of how the Spanish Civil War has been remembered over time, a history that can be appreciated as a process of constant rescaling, of includ- ing and excluding. As such, I argue that within all the different political factions, the remembrance of the civil war has always been framed in transnational frameworks. Moreover, the Spanish Civil War was understood as a foundational myth both by the Francoist regime as well as by the Republican communities in exile.
Simultaneously, the war also functioned as a transnational icon in the antifascist and in the anti-communist struggle. Accordingly, whereas the Spanish Right posits the transition to democracy as the new foundational myth of democratic Spain, the Left has taken up the historical refer- ence of the Second Republic as a new model for identification and modernization. The following three chapters comprise the empirical part of the dissertation.
This narrative is apparently only challenged by the peripheral nationalist autonomies. However, through the haunting comparison between Spain and former Yugoslavia, some of the newspaper articles explore examples of deeper entanglements between the two disparate spatio- temporal spaces of the Spanish Civil War and the wars in former Yugoslavia. The transnational sensi- bilities of the characters descending from such transnational genealogies, relate to the transgression of borders and the recognition of the entangled exclusions of the Spanish nation-state forgotten in the celebratory mood of the s.
As I argue, the transnation- al gaze of the characters in El sitio enables them to recognize the overlapping of space and time and of different histories of violence and injustice in the traces of the past. This time shift also marks the change from the understanding of the civil war as a haunting past to that of the image of the exhumed bones as an urgent present.
Subtierro forwards the role of an affected post-witness, conditioned by a transnational disposition and an engagement with the margins. As such, subtierro as a locus for transna- tional memory inspires the post-witness to reimagine an alternative form of national identity from the margins of the nation-state, that is, from its entangled exclusions. The framework of Holocaust memory outlines conceptions on witnessing and testimony that prove to be central to the reconfiguration of Spanish Civil War memories.
Im- portantly, these imaginative accounts introduce Sepharad as a foundational myth for a new form of Spanishness in Europe; a myth that draws on the construction of Otherness and multiple mnemonic memberships. In these novels, the iconic Holocaust testimony of Primo Levi serves as a trace of the past that produces an emotional reaction in the distanced witness.
Yet, being marked by hegemonic frameworks that set the possibilities and limits for approximating the Holocaust and that establish clear boundaries for a European identity, these novels, as I argue, produce a new set of very clear boundaries for transnational memory, because they ultimately fail to engage with the exclusions they have generated themselves. Positioned as a critical summary, the conclusion articulates the relation between transnational frameworks of memory and the different Spanish proposals for a new inclusive nationalism based on the recognition over time of Otherness and multiplicity.
These hierarchies ask for further inquiry into the location of the witness, so as to understand what these transnational memory articulations really do, that is, what they include and what they exclude, or, how they cut together-apart. Moreover, it posits the ethics of remembrance in the active engagement with the entangled exclusions that are intrinsic to any articulation of memory. And remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual.
The past is never finished. Organized by researchers of the University of Valladolid and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, this three-day conference offered a varied, and above all, intense and emotional program. Facing the tragic prospect of future war crimes and unnecessary victims in which the Spanish state was to be in- volved, we were listening to historians, forensic doctors, political scientists, novelists and artists talking about the Spanish Civil War crimes and its victims. The organizers had organized a round table discussion, inviting relatives of victims to the stage, but many relatives — brothers, partners, children and grandchildren — of the victims had also come to attend the conference.
For them, the conference was a space to give their testimony in front of an open and interested audience. A perfor- mance of which I was not the only foreign audience. The conference included many aspects of the theoretical concerns that are at the core of this dissertation: A highly affective performance that included different kinds of witnesses and generations, the overlapping image of an ongoing war and of a war fought more than fifty years ago, the varied group of memory makers, which in- cluded artists, journalists, scholars, activists and relatives.
Drawing on the theoretical issues that were so present in the conference, in this chapter, I will sketch the different theoretical key-concepts of my performative take on transnational memory studies — witnesses, space, agency, and form —, inspired by the material-discursive theory of philosopher and feminist scholar Karen Barad. Both the title and the name suggest an understanding of memory as something that was once complete but now has to be recovered. The eyewitness, accompanied by claims of authenticity, gains an absolute importance in this model. The present Spanish Republican memory movement not only aims to recover a lost past, but also to start a political reevaluation of the transition towards democracy and with that a reevaluation of the current political situation.
These processes include different forms of communication and mediation, involving processes of selec- tion, convergence, interpretation, modeling, translation and circulation Rigney This is why sociologist Jeffrey Olick stresses the important difference between mnemonic prac- tices reminiscence, recall, representation, commemoration, celebration, regret, renun- ciation, excuse, acknowledgment and products stories, rituals, books, statues, presenta- tions, speeches, images, pictures, records , as he proposes to understand remembering as a fluid negotiation between the desires of the present and the legacies of the past Olick Throughout this study, I will understand memory as a performative process.
In my view, memory, more than a representation of the past in the present, acts upon the present and reshapes the future. Yet the tears of the relatives at the conference, let alone the shadow of the then more than real Iraq War, are also arduously understood within a framework that, by focusing on representation, turns our eyes away from a more pressing political reali- ty. The debatable notion of authenticity in the plenitude-and-loss model enacted by the Spanish memory movement also carries an ethical connotation: Finally I would like to point to the effort by sociologists Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitsky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy who compiled The Collective Memory Reader which provides a very useful overview of past and present key contributions to memory studies.
And, although this model is easily falsified, by embracing the representational model of cultural memory we actually lose this important notion of ethics around which many acts of memory are performed. Her theory of agential realism, indebted with studies of quantum physics, points at the impossibility of separating the observer and the object, words and things, discourse and matter or mind and body. Instead, she pro- poses a process-oriented performative model where we are invited to understand dis- course as entangled material-discursive phenomena.
In her view, discourse is not only a linguistic thing, but also a process or materialization that reconfigures what is possible and what is impossible. The world is composed of these phenomena, which are ontolog- ically inseparable — entangled — agencies. Agential realism, as an immanent enfolding of matter and meaning, posits the objective world as entangled with agency in a way that makes them inseparable, and with that the phenomenon becomes the basic unit of the empirically-verifiable reality.
In what follows, I will set out the different theoretical parts of my agential realist take on transnational memory studies through a discussion of its key concepts: Witnesses At the conference in Valladolid we were all witnesses of some sort.
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Some of us were eyewitnesses to the civil war. Others were secondary witnesses, having lived with the void of a missing parent throughout their lives. Some of us had been witness to the mass grave exhumation. And we were all transnational witnesses — through the media — of the commencing War in Iraq. In many ways, the witness serves as a kind of mediator between event and audience. Based on a short overview of these concepts, I will argue, however, that the witness is not a passive mediator, but stands at the center of the production of cultural memory, making witnessing a performative act.
Testimonial practices and bearing witness lie at the heart of current politics and cultures of memory of violence and the struggle for human rights. Therefore, Annette Wieviorka critiques the way in which indi- vidual memory accounts have overshadowed the academic historical narrative ever since its public recognition in the Eichman trials.
The overwhelming importance of witness accounts in the struggles for justice and recognition of violent histories and with that in the production of a social and cultural memory narratives, has urged several scholars to identify other forms of witnessing than the traditional eyewitness account. In Spain, the witness also performed a key role in the return of the Republican memo- ries of the Spanish Civil War at the turn of the millennium. Indeed the witness became of primordial importance when the renewed interest in the recent past culminated in the exhumation of the mass graves of the civil war.
Here, the eyewitness served as an important source of the concrete information necessary to locate the unmarked mass graves of more than half a century ago.
At the same time, the exhumations ahave creat- ed a new sort of witnessing. As such, Erll points to how, in this model, the forms of transmission are still vertically dependent upon biological ties and familial structures, while the forms of mediation are dependent upon contemporary generational frameworks. Others, such as Alison Landsberg, Michael Rothberg or Annette Seidel Arpaci, have also thought about these new examples of identification on based on the experience of migrants in the United States Landsberg and on the relation between Holocaust memory and labor migrants in Germany Seidel Arpaci ; Rothberg b.
As such, to Faber, adopting the analytical categories produced by Holocaust stud- ies and applying them to the Spanish reality, produces a depoliticization. In his analysis Faber also returns to the producers of these affiliative postmemory accounts, as he brings to the fore several authors of Spanish contemporary memory novels. Reading and writing these novels, he states, is part of the ethical choice to participate in the act of memory and telling and reading these untold stories.
Indeed, the conference in Valladolid displayed these aspects of voluntary commitment not only to a traumatic past, but also to a political cause in the present. Witnesses of a kind, witnesses to exhumed bodies, witnesses to witnesses, all committed to making the voices of the Republican victims heard. Multiple mnemonic memberships — that is, the multiple social groups of remembrance to which an individual can belong, such as his or her religious communi- ty, professional framework, family ties, or political choices — is a concept from sociolo- gist Maurice Halbwachs, which has inspired modern memory scholars to rethink the lines of multiplicity in memory work, particularly in the face of globalization and trans- nationalization Halbwachs ; see also Erll b.
Given the freedom of choice, how do the relatives of the victims cast their mnemonic memberships? And, what exactly informs the choices that the different witnesses make with regards to their mnemonic affiliation to the Spanish Civil War? Throughout my analysis I will foreground affect and emotion as important markers of these choices. Notably, throughout the twentieth century witnessing has increasingly become a transnational practice.
Especially those witness accounts that are addressed to a wider audience than the direct family network of transmission — we could think of the witnesses at the conference, but also of iconic Holocaust witnesses as for instance Primo Levi — draw their success and global dissemi- nation from their capacity to relate the socio-historic specificity of their personal expe- rience to a universal significance and impact. Moreover, claims of authenticity and uniqueness that as epistemological categories often accompany the eyewitness accounts, become problematic when we think about the constructed nature of memory.
Understanding New Media In memory studies, remediation accentuates the diachronic processes that are happening in the production of meaning: According to theories of agential materialism, phenomena are the result of differ- ential patterns of mattering in which agency is located both in the subject as well as in the object. An object in reality, whether it is the Spanish mass graves, the Valley of the Fallen or a novel by Goytisolo, could be understood as one of these phenomena, in which a narrative trope such as the one of Cain and Abel, is entangled in an inseparable way.
The notion of me- diation has for too long stood in the way of a more thoroughgoing accounting of the empirical world. Barad proposes diffraction, as it leads us away from thinking about homologies and analogies, and helps us to focus on specific entangle- ments, marking the limits of the determinacy and permanency of boundaries. Because of the constant reconstitution of phenomena, historicity, or memory, becomes important in her theoretical outline.
The past and the future are enfolded in the constant process of becoming. The ghost points at the entangled relationship between opposites such as continuity and discontinuity, disrupting the linear understanding of time and the idea of representation. That is, there is no past moment that can be represented in the present, the past can only be recreated or performed in the present. With this definition, I hope to convey that memory is not only about the retelling of the past in the present, but also about the ongoing openness of the narrative to future retellings see also Derrida Throughout this dissertation, I will argue that the witness, independent from its original relation to the past event at stake, is actively involved in the dynamic processes of the reiterative re configuration of memory narratives and is at the core of the pro- duction of cultural memories, indebted with the past, the present, and the future.
Space Throughout the twentieth century, memory studies have mainly focused on the circula- tion and configurations of cultural or social memory within the boundaries of the na- tion-state. However, recent processes of globaliza- tion have reframed our present, and with that they have made the already existing pro- cesses of memory that transcend the national boundaries visible. Memory scholars have therefore proposed to rethink cultural memory outside or beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. And importantly, because of this, the epistemological link between space and memory has gained a new place on the research agenda see for instance Schindel and Colombo These developments lie at the basis of my proposal for understanding memory as a process of making and marking space and time in society.
As I will outline below, my turn here to Barad is not a radical change away from the theory that has been proposed before but more a natural next step to take in the concep- tualization of transnational remembrance. Important in Halbwachs theory is the social framework of individual memory, a framework that is transmitted through different generations and through the different social groups one belongs to. With that, social memory is an active marker of social or collective identity.
His strongly hierarchical take on collective memory sets the ultimate boundary at the nation-state as the largest group identity marker. Halbwachs outlines an understanding of space through the social frameworks of groups, emerging most clearly from his comparison between the relevance of space when dreaming and when awake: As such, their mutual connection of deep comradeship is mainly based on imagination. In this way, for Anderson, all nationalism is the result of a social production of space.
Interesting within the scope of this dissertation is the im- portant role Anderson assigns to specific sites of memory in inscribing temporality in the spatial fabric of the imagined nation. Space and time seem intrinsically related. My interest, however, lies however in the relation between space and time on a transnational level. For Appadurai, imagination is a social practice, which negotiates between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. Hence, he suggests to conceive the globalized world through the imagery of chaos, flow and uncer- tainty instead of the imagery of system, order and stability Appadurai , The production of time and transnational space together is probably most explicit- ly present in the work of David Harvey and Andreas Huyssen.
David Harvey, mostly known for his analysis of the construction of space indebted to Lefebvre, points at space, like for instance cartography, as simultaneously a mental and a material construct. Huyssen theorizes memory as a diachronical aspect of space by making use of the liter- ary trope of the palimpsest that displays the temporal layers of spaces while analyzing the way memory and temporality have invaded fixed spaces such as cities, architecture and sculpture.
Notwithstanding the differences between these two authors, they both underscore the entangled relation in the production of time and space beyond the na- tion state. This relation between time and space is also expressed in the correlation between materiality and imaginative discourse. With that, not only the mathematical, measurable underpinning of space, but also the linearity of time is being questioned.
In her view, it is impossible to take these concepts apart, as they do not only depend on each other, but also produce each other. These valuable contributions to the understanding of memory not bound to the nation-state reject notions of purity and authenticity and draw our attention to dynamic transfers between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.
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Note how the idea of a spatialization of time underlines the intrinsic relation between the two. With the metaphor of haunting, Silverman also seems to break away from the linear notion of time. The idea of memory as a palimpsest — also when thinking of the materiality of a palimpsest — comes closest to my proposal of a material-discursive approach to memory. It lacks however a clear conceptualization of the role of agency in the production of the palimpsest. Like Appadurai, Erll invites us to move from a static definition of memory to a process-oriented one, as she sets her idea of travels of memory against the static ex- pression of sites of memory Erll a, Susannah Radstone has written a timely response to these approximations that focus on the dislocation of cultural memories instead of on their possible location.
As such, her article is an invitation to engage with the located- ness, both of the practices of memory and of the researcher, instead of with its non- location, as memory is specific to its site of production and practice. However, Bhabha ultimately maintains the existing differences between opposites, as he underlines the importance of exploring the boundaries not for their deconstruction, but to acquire a position that allows for translation of differences and the construction of solidarity see for instance Bhabha , However, with Barad, I will recognize in-betweenness as a space of en- tanglement, rather than a space of difference and translation.
However, in his analysis of the relations between Japa- nese and German memory paradigms, the two geographies remain rather apart while Conrad presents the two spaces in a comparative mode. Agency Locatedness has a critical relation to agency. The conference in Valladolid im- portantly created a space of agency for the Civil War victims and their relatives; a public space to tell their story and to condemn the democratic governments that had refused or failed to do so. We can view the conference as a specific instance of memory produc- tion, concentrating and connecting various voices, producing a new space for solidarity and activism in the future.
Agency can be located at different levels. We can recognize agency in the testimony accounts, but also in the camera of the Dutch television crew, in the poems of Blas de Otero or in the remote bodies exhumed from the mass grave, cre- ating an affective space and spurring on the witnesses to act upon the present and the future.
As such, remembrance itself has the power to reconfigure the borders between imagined communities. Throughout this dissertation I will consid- er all these different forms of agency. Central to my focus is a reconsideration of the role of the individual in the reconfig- urations of collective memory. Sociologist Jeffrey Olick has proposed a solution to this returning problem in collective memory studies through what he calls collected or individual memory and collective memory Olick In the case of collected memory, the assumption is that there is no such thing as collective memory, and that in the end memories can only be articulated by means of the interpretation of an individual.
Collective memory, on the other hand, points at those processes of socialization that cannot simply be re- duced to individual psychological patterns, and with that Olick points at autonomous symbolic systems that exist within society. Collective memory thus shapes individual memory, while individual memory actualizes collective memory, much like local expe- riences actualize global memory narratives and vice versa.
With that, Crane centralizes individual human agency above all the other possible forms of agency in collective memory. There are two main problems with a focus on this kind of individual human agency in the construction of collective memory. First of all, the special attention given to the maker of memory representations also carries within it a general neglect for the study of reception Kansteiner ; Faber One way of studying the reception of memory narratives is through their remediation, their institutionalization or their becoming part of a cultural canon.
However, even if we study the reception history of a cultural prod- uct, we will re-encounter the divide between the collective and the individual, as recep- tion is also related to context, previous knowledge, political engagement etc. Feminist insights related to agency and embodiment can help to overcome these recurring ontological problems in the conceptualization of collective or cultural memory.
Anthropologist Paul Connerton, in his performative approach to history, memory and forgetting, pays particular attention to the role of the body in agency Connerton ; Connerton Within the practices of memory, the body is an object of dis- course and knowledge, but is also shaped in its practices and behavior in a cultural way.
In The Spirit of Mourning, Connerton particularly concentrates on the affective invest- ment in topography, the places of memory, stating that the art-of-memory tradition neglected the affective investment in life-spaces and the repercussions of that affectivity on cultural memory. He defines the bodily mnemonic relation to the world in three categories: However, it is particularly the theory of affect, different than theories of emotion and empathy, that tries to go beyond a simple linguistic understanding of the world, when defining affect as the response to stimuli at a precognitive and prelinguistic level Massumi ; Gregg and Seigworth In order to bridge the divide between the human and non-human agency, and between linguistic and matter-based theories, anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin proposes a reading of embodiment that merges theories of affect and subjectivity as well as those of language and materiality.
On the basis of her ethnography of looted objects from the displaced Greek-Cypriots in Nothern Cyprus, Navaro-Yashin concludes that affect or melancholy related to the past can be discharged by objects as well as by persons. Affect, according to Navaro-Yashin, is located in objects as well as in subjective minds. And, importantly, objects do not affect people whenever they can or want to. Cultural memory as such can be understood as inscribed or embodied in the fabric of the world.
Far from offering a representational narrative about the Civil War, these bodies are an affective and embodied reality acting upon the present. Katherine Verdery has pioneered the scholarly understanding of dead bodies in relation to memory. Furthermore, she points at dead bodies as affective symbols because of their ineluctable self-referentiality: Although Verdery understands the body as an object of cultural memory, she simul- taneously recognizes the important and inherent performative and affective qualities of a body-to-body relation.
In relation to the Spanish exhumations, Layla Renshaw shows that, even more than the bodies, it is the objects that emerge from the graves, a watch, a shoe, a pair of glasses, that have a particularly affective power on the witnesses, as it relates more directly to the personhood of the dead Renshaw Rachel Ceasar, on the other hand, shows how the knowledge production at the Spanish exhumation sites draws importantly on personal and emotional aspects Ceasar Throughout the analysis of my quite textual corpus of Spanish transnational memory, I will be particularly attentive to the role of affect and emotion in the construc- tion of transnational memory.
In understanding these texts as mnemonic practices rather than as objects, I will look at the way they offer forms of embodied knowledge, but also at how affect works at both an intra-textual and extra-textual level Labanyi a. It is at the level of emotion and affect, that we can bridge the gap between subject the individual and object the collective. Within the measurement lies the decision of what is included and what is excluded.
The exclusions, however, are not outside of the phenomenon. They are entangled with that what is included. Remembrance, instead of being a process of Othering, can be seen as a process of the recognition of the connec- tions and commitments to the other. Following this idea, the role of agency in the formation of transnational memory is intrinsically related to justice. I would add to this question, related questions about agency and purpose. Whereas I feel that the question of the mechanisms of transnational memory targets mainly questions of form, relating back to theories of how transnational memory works — such as the multidirectonal, palimpsestic or traveling notions of memory —, questions of agency and purpose target who or what controls these mechanisms and what are the intentions.
Many early explorations into the transnational scope of memory have adopted a hierarchical understanding of the transnational as a constant negotia- tion between global discourses and local practices. The use of the Holocaust as a worldwide metaphor for mass atrocities is an example of that approach.
The Holocaust becomes a symbol of human rights abuses across the globe. In that sense, they focus on how local experiences inform grand narratives within the stretched social framework. The frameworks of human rights and transitional justice are indeed based on and informed by local experiences. At the same time the Spanish-Argentine term desaparecido has been circulating around the globe as a new icon of human rights abuses and has been applied to other unrelated historical injustices, such as the tne thousands of undocu- mented killings and burials of many Spanish civilians in the rearguards during the Spanish Civil War.
These processes appear in memory narratives in the form of the three main rhetori- cal figures of speech: A metaphor identifies something as being the same as some other unrelated thing. Iconic memories have an overwhelming presence in public discourse and are somehow unchained from their specific historical meaning. The most famous example is that of the Holocaust as an icon of memory. Aleida Ass- mann defines several steps in the process of iconization of the Holocaust: Ultimately, the representation of the event starts to take on live a life of its own, as it constantly resurfaces within the public space, especially when people talk about other events and other social issues Leavy , 4—5.
Analogy is the figure of speech used for setting comparisons. Within the space of transnational memory, Michael Rothberg portrays the axis of comparison as one that moves from equation to differentiation Moses and Rothberg , Particularly on the side of equation, the analogy raises discussions about competition. In Spain, com- petitive memories are played out on a daily basis. Here, a battle of memory is fought over what will be the official reading of the Spanish Civil War, a battle between hege- monic memory and counter-memory.
Against the claim for recognition and visibility of the Republican dead left behind in numerous unmarked graves all over the country, right-wing Spain consistently posits the memory of the illegal killings on the Republican side, featuring the thousands of murdered prisoners at Paracuellos, at the outskirts of Madrid. On a different level, Justin Crumbaugh points at the entanglements between victims of the Spanish Civil War and victims of Basque terrorism in the Spanish con- servative configuration of victimhood over the past ten years Crumbaugh At the same time, other con- flicts serve as frameworks or models that help to articulate or even understand previous or later conflicts.
Therefore, Rothberg portrays public space not as a place where established memories are articulated but as a place where, through interaction, memories come into being. Interestingly, as different scholars of journalism and memory suggest, the historical comparison is one of the classic models used in journalistic narrative in order to make sense of the present.
Zeliz- er describes this use of the past by the media as: Whereas the metaphor is a representational figure, as it transfers meaning from one object to another, metonymy is based on association in which the referent is absent. That is why historian Eelco Runia refers to metonymies as displaced words denoting presence in absence Runia However, as he carefully describes, he does not understand the metaphor as collapsing one ele- ment into another so that they become the same.
As I have indicated before, in this dissertation I will think of the relation between identity and memory in terms of choice and self-identification, a position that I will research from the angle of affect and emotion. Journalists emphasize the present rather than the past, providing a first, rather than a final draft of history and of memory , and it is precisely this focus on the present which aligns journalism with memory when it is considered as a recollection of the past dependent on the present Zelizer , The narrative genre also seems to produce patterns of in- and exclusion.
Similarly, Michael Rothberg , ; ; — argues that the travel account and the detective story are particularly suitable to connect disparate geo- graphical spaces and histories. Indeed, we also encounter these genres in the archive of transnational memories of the Spanish Civil War: Furthermore, although it is not directly related to transnational memory, Joseph R. Slaughter has made an interesting case for relating the literary form to the paradigm of Human Rights as he relates particularly the genre of the Bildungsroman — a didactic coming-of-age story — to the narrative form and the construction of personhood through Human Rights.
His book Human Rights, Inc. At the same time, his thorough analysis brings about a compelling argument for the deep imbrications of literature and the extra-literary world being an integral element of social change. The imbrication between Human Rights, the genre of the Bildungsroman and Spanish Civil War remembrance within a transnational frame will become a recurring theme in chapter 5. In conclusion, the form of memory narratives is important since it allows for certain patterns of inclusion and exclusion to emerge in the transnational field of remem- brance. Assmann ; Moses and Rothberg Central to this proposal is the understanding of memory as an iterative process of making and marking time and space in society.
Central concepts to this theoretical proposal are witnesses, space, agency, and form. As such, I claim the central role of witnesses in the production of transnational memory. Form, the last concept in this model, is particularly related to my selection of sources, which, as I argue, entangled with agency. The conference in Valladolid marked the end of silence, being a performative reconfiguration of the boundaries of memory practices, a reconfiguration of inclusions and exclusions. On a larger scale, the conference was haunted by the future killings in Iraq and by the past killings during the Spanish Civil War.
At the same time the confer- ence marks the beginning for this dissertation, chronicling the beginning of my scholar- ly endeavors into the memories of the Spanish Civil War and illustrating the tempo- geographical cuts that I have effectuated: Spanish memory politics at the turn of the twenty-first century.
It was indeed a very affective time in my scholarly endeavors. The slogan was meant to attract foreign tourists to the exotic features of Spain. The phrase, coined by Manuel Fraga, minister of Tourism and Information in the s under Franco, evoked an orientalist vision of Spain from a European perspective. Nowa- days, the phrase is mostly used ironically, for instance when talking about recent politi- cal corruption scandals. The truth is, however, that the memory and imagery of the Spanish Civil War followed a remarkable transnational trajectory from the very start.
Throughout this chapter I will ask why and in what way the memory of the Spanish Civil War has been articulated and reconfigured transnationally, even if the event and its memory are strongly related to questions of national identity. Indeed the Spanish Civil War marked a radical change. But also the national boundaries of Spain as a nation- state are porous phenomena which over time have allowed different forms of inclusions and exclusions.
In the words of Barad, differentiating is not about radical separation, but about making con- nections and commitments Barad Even if the Spanish Civil War became the foundational myth for Spanish intellectuals both from the Right and the Left of the political spectrum, as the war reconfigured the relations of exteriority and connectivity, the resulting exclusions have always been entangled or even embodied in the phenome- non itself.
Politically, their approaches proposed different roads to modernity, some more authoritarian and others more democratic. Following, different approaches developed over the course of the first decennia of the twentieth century under the influence of transnational ideologies such as socialism, communism, anarchism and fascism, which came to face each other in the armed civil war, as a result of the military coup of July 18, Not only were the outside boundaries of the country reconfigured through the colonial losses, the internal boundaries were also questioned as a result of the Catalan and Basque nationalist movements which were gaining a stronger political voice at the beginning of the twentieth century.
To give another example of these processes of rescaling, at the turn of the twenty- first century, the newly articulated memories of the civil war can again be understood as a process of rescaling. The reencounter with the sub- terrados has opened up a transnational register through their appeal to the contempo- rary transnational frameworks of Human Rights and international justice.
The desterra- dos, on the other hand, offer a counter-narrative to Spanishness in the s, based on their collective memories which have been shaped in exile. On a different scale, the failure of the communist project in East Europe, processes of globalization, and the expansion of the European Union have influenced identity politics around the world. Within these processes of rescaling, memory practices are transformed, challenged or redefined.
Sociologists Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy focus particularly on the tem- poral aspects of rescaling when they characterize memory politics as an ongoing process of negotiation. Within these processes, memory can work as a constraint in the present in various ways Olick and Levy These constraints function mainly through processes of proscription, such as taboos and prohibitions, and through pre- scription, such as duties and requirements.
We can think for instance of the way certain historical topics remain social taboos — this includes the colonial war crimes in many European countries — while, on the other hand, some others are part of a sociocultural requirement — as for instance Holocaust remembrance after Assmann , Olick and Levy notably do not con- sider the temporal distance of the past, but instead its impact on sociocultural and polit- ical constructions in the present. The transformation and redefinition of memory practices also mean the transgres- sion of such cultural constraints.
Through the course of this chapter, I will identify how the Spanish Civil War works as a cultural and political force and how its official reading is transgressed at particular moments.
Richards identifies three myths: Indeed, these have been the three most important readings of the civil war throughout the dictatorship. Yet, with the transition to democracy, we should add a fourth grand narrative of the Spanish Civil War, which is the reading of the civil war as a violation of democracy. Within this framework, I will argue that the Right tries to defend certain grand narra- tives of the past in the form of proscriptions taboo and prohibition , while the advo- cates of the political Left try to transgress the taboo of the civil war, turning the memory of the war into a prescription, as they claim public recognition, remembrance and ex- humation of the Republican victims as a duty of the state.
Dealing with the past of the Spanish Civil War is a pending topic that constitutes a duty in the present.