As a cultural critic of modern Spain, Faber offers multiple perspectives through literary, film, and photo criticism as well as interviews and discussions with historians, literary scholars, and other intellectuals. What is the relation of history to memory? Who gets to do the work of history and who can do the work of memory? Can one do history and memory work at the same time? Is truth to be found only in academic exploration of archives or can artistic representations take us closer to the reality of the tragedy that the country had to go through? Sebastiaan Faber’s latest book comes in a wave of recent scholarship that seeks to probe these difficult questions. This articulation opens its own can of worms. As the name of the law suggests, the path to justice was supposed to be paved through a recovery of both “history” and “memory” of the nation’s past. But it has once again gained strength in recent years with the passing of the Law of Historical Memory in 2007 that sought both symbolic and material reparations for the victims of the Francoist repression.
The pursuit of justice for victims and survivors of the Civil War has been an issue that has divided politicians, jurists, intellectuals, and members of the civil society ever since Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975. The Left, however, argues that it is only by transferring the dictator’s remains to a different location that people who were persecuted or perished during Spain’s civil war (1936-39) can receive justice. The right-leaning parties claim that this is hardly an urgent issue and there is nothing to be gained by opening past wounds. In 2018, when the Spanish government, then run by a coalition of left-wing parties, ordered the exhumation of the remains of General Franco from a state-funded monument, it was not only digging up his bones, but also the country’s still unsettled past.
Reviewed by Gaurav Pai (University of Washington)Ĭommissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark) Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018.
Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography.
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