In this sophisticated study, Antonio Míguez Macho and his team of expert scholars explore the connections between violence and memory in modern Spain. Most importantly for a nation with an uncomfortable relationship with its own past, this book reveals how sites of violence also became sites of forgetting. Centred around places of violence such as concentration camps and military courts where prisoners endured horrific forced labour and were sentenced to death, this book looks at how and why the history of these sites were obscured. Issues addressed include: how Guernica came to represent Francoist front-line brutality and so concealed violence behind the lines; the need to preserve drawings made by concentration camp inmates that record a history the regime hoped to silence; the contests over plaques and monuments erected to honour victims; and the ways forging a historical record through human rights cases helps shape a new collective memory. Shining a spotlight on these important topics for the first time, this book provides a new perspective on one of the major issues of 20th-century Spanish history: the history and memory of Francoist violence. As such, Sites of Violence and Memory in Modern Spain is an invaluable resource for all scholars of modern Spain, memory culture, and public history.

In this sophisticated study, Antonio Míguez Macho and his team of expert scholars explore the connections between violence and memory in modern Spain. Most importantly for a nation with an uncomfortable relationship with its own past, this book reveals how sites of violence also became sites of forgetting. Centred around places of violence such as concentration camps and military courts where prisoners endured horrific forced labour and were sentenced to death, this book looks at how and why the history of these sites were obscured. Issues addressed include: how Guernica came to represent Francoist front-line brutality and so concealed violence behind the lines; the need to preserve drawings made by concentration camp inmates that record a history the regime hoped to silence; the contests over plaques and monuments erected to honour victims; and the ways forging a historical record through human rights cases helps shape a new collective memory. Shining a spotlight on these important topics for the first time, this book provides a new perspective on one of the major issues of 20th-century Spanish history: the history and memory of Francoist violence. As such, Sites of Violence and Memory in Modern Spain is an invaluable resource for all scholars of modern Spain, memory culture, and public history.

Using a rich variety of sources, this book explores how the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War influenced the transition to democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975.

In 25 innovative thematic essays, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War sees an interdisciplinary team of scholars examine a conflict that, more than 80 years after its conclusion, continues to generate both scholarly and public controversy. Split into four main sections covering Military and Diplomatic Issues, Society and Culture, Politics, and Debates, the volume offers a number of unique features. It is unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and includes chapters on topics that are rarely, if ever, explored in the literature of the field: humanitarianism, children and families, material conditions, the decimation of elites, archives and sources, archaeological approaches, digital approaches, public history, and cultural studies approaches. Instead of discussing each of the two warring sides, Republicans and Francoists, separately, as is so often the case, the book's thematic structure means that these opposing forces are examined together, facilitating comparison and fresh understanding in numerous areas of study. Contributors from the UK, the USA, Canada, Spain and Denmark also analyse the major controversies and disputes surrounding each topic as part of a detailed exploration of one of the seminal events of the 20th century.

Volume III examines the most well-known century of genocide, the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion on the definitions of genocide and 'ethnic cleansing' and their relationships to modernity, it continues with a survey of the genocide studies field, racism and antisemitism. The four parts cover the impacts of Racism, Total War, Imperial Collapse, and Revolution; the crises of World War Two; the Cold War; and Globalization. Twenty-eight scholars with expertise in specific regions document thirty genocides from 1918 to 2021, in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The cases range from the Armenian Genocide to Maoist China, from the Holocaust to Stalin's Ukraine, from Indonesia to Guatemala, Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and finally the contemporary fate of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the ISIS slaughter of Yazidis in Iraq. The volume ends with a chapter on the strategies for genocide prevention moving forward.

Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America is part of the corpus of studies in historical memory, particularly those reflecting issues of historical memory in Hispanic societies. This collection covers a heterogeneous body of cultural products and social movements emerging in ...

The 2015 law granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 is the latest example of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary Spain, the "re-discovery" of its Jewish heritage. In The Memory Work of Jewish Spain, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa examine the implications of reclaiming this memory through the analysis of a comprehensive range of emerging cultural practices, political initiatives and institutions in the context of the long history of Spain's ambivalence towards its Jewish past. Through oral interviews, analyses of museums, newly reconfigured "Jewish quarters," excavated Jewish sites, popular festivals, tourist brochures, literature and art, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain explores what happens when these initiatives are implemented at the local level in cities and towns throughout Spain, and how they affect Spain's present.

This book explores the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, whether as a motor for the prolongation of violence or as a resource for building reconciliation. The research was driven by two main goals: to understand the post-conflict reconstruction process and to identify how this process evolves in the medium term and the impact it has on society. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its subsequent phases of reconstruction provides the primary material for this exploration. In pursuit of the first goal, the book centers on the material practices and rhetorical strategies developed around cultural heritage in post-civil war Spain and the victorious Franco regime's reconstruction. The analysis captures a discursively complex set of practices that made up the reconstruction and in which a variety of Spanish heritage sites were claimed, rebuilt or restored, and represented - as signs of historical narratives, political legitimacy, and group identity. The reconstruction of the town of Gernika is a particularly emblematic instance of destruction and a significant symbol within the Basque regions of Spain, as well as internationally. By examining Gernika, it is possible to identify some of the trends common to the reconstruction as a whole, along with those aspects that pertain to its singular symbolic resonance. In order to achieve the second goal, the book examines the processes of selection, value change, and exclusionary dynamics of reconstruction. Exploring the possible impact of post-civil war reconstruction in the medium term is conducted in two time frames: the period of political transition that followed General Franco's death in 1975, and the 2004-2008 period when Rodriguez Zapatero's government undertook initiatives to 'recover the historic memory' of the war and dictatorship. Finally, the observations made of the Spanish reconstruction are analyzed in terms of how they might reveal general trends in post-conflict reconstruction processes in relation to cultural heritage. These insights are pertinent to the situations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Authors from a variety of disciplines dealing with diverse historical cases engage with the spatial deployment of violence and the possibilities for memory and resistance in contexts of state sponsored violence, enforced disappearances and regimes of exception. Contributors include Aleida Assmann, Jay Winter and David Harvey.

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain True, false, or both? Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy. Pedro Almodóvar is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s. As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views. Censorship can benefit literature. Memory is not the same thing as history. Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe-wrongly-that under Franco's fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco's side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible. The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia) have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history of fascism. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book. Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there-monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video games-and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.