Recovery Of Historical Memory Research Articles

Antonio Altarriba’s El ala rota: remembering a woman hidden in ‘the back room of history’

ABSTRACT This paper examines Antonio Altarriba’s presentation of his deceased mother’s life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author’s personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain’s 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender.

El juego popular de las cuatro esquinas: 30 variantes para recuperar su uso en la educación del siglo XXI

La recuperación de la memoria histórica tiene que ser en la sociedad del siglo XXI una prioridad si no se quiere perder la identidad. En esta línea, el objeto de estudio del presente trabajo es el juego popular de las cuatro esquinas. Concretamente se pretende mantener viva esta actividad lúdica y que queda borrada en las mentes de la juventud. Para ello, y a partir de una metodología centrada en el análisis de las principales obras escritas, en torno al siglo XIX e inicios del XX se asientan las bases para proponer modificaciones. A partir de aquí, y como resultado, se proponen 30 variantes del juego.La finalidad es ofrecer un ejemplo de las múltiples opciones, en este caso de las cuatro esquinas, para mantener viva la llama de la tradición, aunque adaptándola a la actualidad.

Am I, Me, and Who's She? Liberation Psychology, Historical Memory, and Muslim women

One of the central underpinnings of Islamophobia is the theoretical construction of Muslim women as “Other”. Going hand in hand with colonization, the overall Orientalist imaginary has depicted Muslims as misogynistic, homophobic, and gynophobic in contrast to the normal and enlightened Western European subject. Liberation psychology, as a field of decolonial work, emphasizes several main tasks one of which is the recovery of historical memory in relation to how humans see each other and the world. This paper builds on the work of recovering historical memory to emphasize the Indo-European origins of misogyny and patriarchy and the subsequent cover-up of this history as a part of the legacy of colonialism and current narratives of Islamophobia. The paper concludes that the work of psychology should include decoding reality to uncover the true nature of the origins of patriarchy, thus building new, revitalized understandings of human society.

Television Serial Fiction in Spain: Between Deregulation and the Analogue Switch-off (1990–2010)

This article examines the transformation of television serial fiction in Spain from deregulation and the early stages of private television to the dawn of the digital era (1990–2010). The adaptation of Latin-American telenovelas and English-speaking soap operas to the local context brought traditional Spanish costumbrismo in television fiction up to date. Using this as a starting point, the study identifies four stages of the long-running serial format in Spain that demonstrate its capacity to adapt to a double logic of transnationalization maintaining proximity to regional markets alongside a process of gradual adjustment to the changing social, cultural and economic context. The consolidation of democracy in Spain and successive Socialist administrations (1982–1990) favoured the renewal of themes from classical melodrama with the inclusion of issues until then barely addressed, including women’s liberation, sexuality and the recovery of historical memory: topics that have become the mainstay of Spanish television serial fiction in the twenty-first century.

Проблеми збереження й охорони каменотесних пам’яток в етнокультурному ландшафті: відновлення історичної пам’яті та форми сучасної репрезентації

Проблеми збереження й охорони каменотесних пам’яток в етнокультурному ландшафті: відновлення історичної пам’яті та форми сучасної репрезентації

The Discourse of Silence as Testimony in Jenn Díaz's Es un decir

The explosion of interest in the recovery of historical memory in Spain seeks to address many decades of silence and forgetting during the years of the Franco dictatorship and afterwards. Working with trauma theory, Michel Foucault's understanding of silence as discourse, as well as queer theory's exploration of silence as strategy and power, this article examines the multiple roles of silence in Jenn Diaz's Es un decir (2014), a novel that portrays the effects of political violence on three generations of women living in postwar Spain. With closer examination of the dynamic between enunciated and silenced discourses in the novel, this study aims to understand how silence communicates and testifies to traumatic pain and memory, strength, and resistance. This analysis shows that silence in the face of trauma does not indicate weakness, nor does it equal forgetting. Rather, it is a part of discourse that expresses suffering, conveys strength, and safeguards memory.

La memoria histórica en los procesos de acompañamiento pastoral a personas en situación de desplazamiento

In socio-political processes of overcoming armed conflict, the Historical Memory is taking a central point because of the role it plays for effective reconciliation where “truth, reparation and forgiveness” are part of that process. Christian experience, as memory community has much to contribute to articulate the critical reflection about what memory, from where, from whom; with the liberating potential of the God who takes the side of the victims and doesn’t allow to forget them neither their pain and seeks transformation. Besides, incorporate the gender perspective, allow to recognize the gender differences and their influences in the recovery of historical memory. Show the relevance of these articulations is the purpose of

Technologies of the Afterlife

In August 2011, I attended the exhumation of Severiano Clemente González, conducted by the Forum for Memory in the Castilian town of La Toba, Guadalajara. Mr González was one of the over 130,000 civilian victims of the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Even after Spain’s democratic constitution in 1978, most families could not recover their loved ones, owing to an unofficial ‘Pact of Silence’ whereby major political actors agreed not to legislate, litigate or discuss the still controversial past in the public sphere (Encarnación 2014). Since 2000, however, civil society organisations such as the Forum for Memory and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) have been leading a series of forensic exhumations – modelled after similar state-led interventions in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe (Ferrándiz 2010; Rubin 2014).

Ghosts of the Holocaust in Franco’s mass graves: Cosmopolitan memories and the politics of “never again”

This essay presents a sociological analysis of what is known in Spain as the “recovery of historical memory” and the politics deriving from this recovery. This process was catalyzed by the exhumations of the remains of victims of Francoism that have been under way since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to do this, we will use the literature on cosmopolitan sociology and provide a dialogue between this sociology and recent developments in the study of social and cultural memory using concepts like postmemory, multidirectional, and cosmopolitan memory. The article moves beyond the national context and looks at Spanish memory politics through the theory and praxis of Holocaust memory on the one hand and the memory of the Argentinean victims of the military dictatorship on the other hand. This will enable us to identify the components and problems of a culture and politics of globalized memory.

Memory and the Cycle of Violence in José Antonio Labordeta's En el remolino (2007)

Since the end of the twentieth century Spain has witnessed a boom in the production of films and publication of novels and books on the Spanish Civil War as part of a process known as the recovery of historical memory. While this is generally seen in positive terms, there is some disquiet about the potential for harm in too much remembering. This essay argues that it is important not just to remember past violence but to understand the nature of violence, and in particular the violence perpetrated in a civil war. En el remolino (2007) by José Antonio Labordeta is studied in the context of Stathis Kalyvas’ work on civil war violence and Judith Butler's notion of precarious lives as an illustration of both the potential dangers of memory and the need for democratic states to be built on a normative moral code which recognizes the worth of the individual.

Mass Graves from the Civil War and the Franco Era in Spain: Once Forgotten, Now at the Heart of the Public Debate

Since October 2000, mass graves from the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship have become the most visible issue of the process of recovery of historical memory in Spain, as a metaphor for digging up the traumatic past. This paper offers a historical reading of this process, pointing out the importance of recovering the buried bodies to give them a worthy burial, to restore their memory, and to allow families to complete their mourning. Mass graves have been the subject of different interventions: they have been located, marked and dignified, in some cases opened and the human remains exhumed. The graves, previously symbols of silence and oblivion are now sites of mourning and memory. In addition, many forgotten memories have been recovered. The victims of the war and the dictatorship have returned to the heart of the public debate, although not without controversy.

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain ed. by Carlos Jerez-Farrán y Samuel Amago (review)

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain ed. by Carlos Jerez-Farrán y Samuel Amago (review)

The Role of Archives in the Movement for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. La Rioja: A Regional Case Study

Recent decades have witnessed the development of a grass-roots movement for the recovery of historical memory in Spain. The descendents of the victims of Francoism have organized in associations and are seeking to break the silence surrounding the repression wrought during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the ensuing dictatorship (1939–1975). Studies of the repression have been written and mass graves exhumed in efforts to uncover the scale of the repression and to commemorate its victims. Archives have facilitated this process, enabling the listing, location and exhumation of victims and assisting the relatives of those killed in claiming compensation. The part that archives have played has been shaped by the nature of the repression which often left no documentary trace, the legacy of the dictatorship on the archives and the slow pace of legal and political reform since the transition to democracy both in support of the recovery movement and in facilitating access to archives. The Spanish experience, exemplified here through an examination of La Rioja as a regional case study, sheds light on the ways in which archives can contribute to national reconciliation, the re-shaping of collective memory and in helping to secure human rights in post-dictatorial societies.

Aesthetics and the ‘Other’ in Recent Novels of the Spanish Civil War

This essay considers the nature of the contribution made by contemporary Spanish novelists to the process of the recovery of historical memory and the construction of a democratic state in Spain specifically from within the literary field. It begins by reviewing some current thinking in critical theory on the role of literature in society and the relationship between the arts and democracy before moving on to an analysis of two novels published in 2006: Tres cipreses by Manuel Ramos Ramos and La higuera by Ramiro Pinilla. The purpose of this analysis is to show how even today some novels continue to offer one-sided accounts of the Spanish Civil War while others offer a more complex account of the events and to argue that while the first does little to further understanding of the conflict, the latter can be read in a literary mode which, by offering an encounter with ‘the other’, deepens understanding and so makes an essential contribution to a maturing democracy.

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, ed. Carlos Jerez-Farran and Samuel Amago * The Francoist Military Trials: Terror and Complicity, 1939-1945, by Peter Anderson

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, ed. Carlos Jerez-Farran and Samuel Amago * The Francoist Military Trials: Terror and Complicity, 1939-1945, by Peter Anderson

Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (review)

Reviewed by: Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain Annabel Martín Jerez-farrán, Carlos and Samuel Amago (Eds). Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2010. 394 pages. Carlos Jerez-Farrán and Samuel Amago’s well-conceived and tightly knit anthology, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain begins with a restitutive impulse dedicated “to those who fought and continue to fight for justice and the defense of democratic rights, arduously gained, perilously maintained” (i) in Spain. The editors of this volume model how serious intellectual work, like the kind showcased here, is as much a part of the delicate process of reconciliation as is the re-burial of the remains of thou [End Page 103] sands of Spaniards who indignantly lie in mass graves. The scholarship in this volume highlights how these graves are haphazardly beginning to form part of the fabric of democracy in Spain. Jerez-Ferrán and Amago begin their introduction recalling Lorca’s words in an uncanny fashion: “a dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anywhere else in the world: his profile hurts like a razor’s edge” (1). One could debate whether the intensity of the “life” of the dead is a Spanish idiosyncrasy or not, but Lorca does put his finger on how the dead, when victim of political violence, improperly and insufficiently mourned, wound the living, and thereby assault democracy. Fortunately, despite the efforts of an unscrupulous and unpatriotic Right, today that injury is no longer a national secret. Scholars and students of contemporary Spain, of Holocaust studies, of history and cultural memory, of political and cultural anthropology learn from this interdisciplinary volume just how complex and nuanced the study of historical memory becomes for societies coerced into amnesia. Such was the case of the “pactista” and revisionist mentality of the Spanish transition to democracy period of the mid 1970s and 1980s, a time when the governing Right and the emerging Left threw another layer of dirt upon the dead in order to keep the wound from bleeding in public. Today we understand that the celebrated, peaceful Transition placed Spanish civil society on troubled ground. In a consequential turn, democracy in Spain has evolved from a prior focus on its political structures, agents, and the uprooting of a dictatorship to a question of its moral and ethical legitimacy given the place rightfully given to the legacy of the dead. All of the contributions in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy address this issue in one way or another teaching us, in Joan Ramón Resina’s words, to never underestimate the power of unearthing the past given what it might reveal and announce: the rush of consciousness and the release of contained expectations turn those remains into our contemporaries. Just as long-buried objects can turn into dust at the slightest aeration, the re-emergence of the ‘secret’ dead annihilates at once the meticulous work of mandated amnesia. But it is not only the so-called peace of Francoism that crumbles with the return of the repressed. Those frail vestiges of the past violence foul a quarter of a century of foul democracy. (224) How, then, does one live with the dead, with the dead of the state? How can a society address the stench underlying its institutions? Antigone taught us that the proper burial of the brother was more than a clash between the law of kinship and the law of the state. Her defiance, as Resina aptly points out, makes her more a model or “spokesperson for the political legitimacy that Creon’s arbitrariness threatens. [ . . . ] By turning the scene of horror into one of culture she not only reasserts humanity but in fact turns the state against itself. And in this way she reinvents it” (232). This is the underlying project governing the selection of texts and organization of this anthology, an attempt at finding a new ground for the foundational site of memory (Richards 122) in contemporary Spain. [End Page 104] The impressive set of...

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (review)

Reviewed by: Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain Germán Labrador Méndez Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Editado por Carlos Jerez-Farrán y Samuel Amago. Estamos ante un nuevo volumen colectivo organizado alrededor de la "memoria histórica," área hoy dominante en la producción de conocimiento del peninsularismo, que, por su acusada necesidad de retroalimentación, amenaza con plegarse sobre sus propios términos de debate. Conocemos bien los parámetros y marcos del análisis: la existencia y apertura reciente de las fosas de la represión franquista, en un contexto internacional de discusión intelectual y jurídica sobre víctimas, dictaduras y derechos humanos, sitúa el caso español en el centro de un diálogo polifónico, no exento de caracteres polémicos, al que los investigadores universitarios contribuyen. Por ello mismo, cabe exigir a toda monografía o libro colectivo que se atreva a aumentar la ya inflacionada bibliografía académica sobre la memoria histórica que aporte de algún modo su diferencial: ya como ampliación de los objetos de estudio, de las perspectivas, de los ámbitos de recepción o del lenguaje crítico. Cabe pues requerir a los nuevos trabajos sobre la memoria histórica que dispongan de un mapa no ya de la memoria histórica como problema de la cultura española contemporánea sino también como asunto interno del peninsularismo y de su ámbito discursivo e institucional, a ambos lados del océano y con toda la complejidad que el tema solicita. En ese sentido, no así en otros, este libro colectivo puede dejar en el especialista una sensación ambigua, no exenta de cierta melancolía, como si el territorio académico donde se cultiva la memoria histórica fuese en realidad una gigantesca "cueva del eco." Para un tipo de lector menos habituado a los argumentos y al lenguaje de la memoria histórica este volumen tiene el indudable atractivo de presentar un panorama completo y pintoresco de cuáles son los asuntos que construyen la memoria histórica como discurso en que toman parte académicos, sociedad civil, colectivos de víctimas, espacio público y memorias colectivas alrededor de las presencias y ausencias de representaciones del pasado español, sobre el telón histórico y político del franquismo y desde el teatro de la guerra civil, prácticas que tienen como objeto material, como verdadero desencadenante del discurso, las fosas colectivas de la represión franquista y los huesos de sus represaliados que inquietan en el acto de salir a la luz. La exhumación de huesos que llevan a cabo los forenses y activistas de las asociaciones de memoria desde el año 2000, como metonimia de otras excavaciones figuradas, de voces, de sujetos, de textos o de culturas que el pasado dictatorial habría sepultado, da título al volumen. De ello debería derivarse la existencia de realidades objetivas, ocultas por la violencia política, perpetuadas por el trauma colectivo de la guerra, a la espera de un forense, o de un peninsularista, que las haga emerger, brillar, ser, como si la memoria histórica se recuperase y no se construyese, se imaginase, se dialogase, o se (des)reconociese. Esta necesidad de someter a una crítica teórica algunas de las mot d'ordre del movimiento civil de la memoria, tal vez como un intento de serle útil, es una virtud, implícita en muchos casos, que hay que reconocerle a este volumen. Estas premisas reúnen una impresionante nómina de colaboradores, en la que participan algunos de los más notables especialistas de la cuestión, autoras y autores que, desde distintos espacios académicos y disciplinas, han abierto en la última década el campo de la memoria, y han puesto en primera línea de investigación la relación apasionada que la cultura española contemporánea mantiene con su pasado a través de la presencia y la ausencia de sus muertos. La...

Memória de egressos da Escola de Enfermagem da Universidade de São Paulo

This is a study of social-historical approach, contributing to the recovery of memory and identity of the profession of nursing. The objectives of this study were to identify the situations of facilities and/or difficulties towards professional development during the undergraduate course and after insertion in the labor market by alumni EEUSP formed in the de1980/1981. We used the Oral History of Life for data collection and technique of Bardin technique for interpretation and analysis of findings. Seventeen graduated nurses were interviewed: some subjects revealed facilities for professional practice as to have more than a job, autonomy and actuation in different areas of knowledge and of practice. Other research collaborators considered that the difficulties they experienced were related to working conditions, remuneration, working hours, among others aspects. The study provided the continuity of the pioneering work started in the 1970s, in that school, were identified in which the graduates in the period 1946 to 1979, contributing to the recovery of historical memory of nursing.

Francoist nostalgia and memories of the Spanish Civil War

The revisionism of the last decade with regard to the Spanish Civil War is closely related to the emergence of extensive research on Francoist violence and a huge social mobilisation around the recovery of historical memory. The aim of the revisionists is to counteract the effects of this mobilisation, whose purpose is the construction of an alternative memory of the Civil War as well as the social recognition of and dignity for Franco's victims. The phenomenon of revisionism is handicapping the already complex relationship between history and memory, because it has favoured the emergence of another or new collective memory impregnated with Francoist nostalgia, which at the same time is making it easier to use the past as a weapon to stir up present political tensions using stereotypical and simplistic discourse. To understand the traumatic past, historians need to be aware of the limits of these collective memories since they tend to obscure the complexities of the past.

The paradoxes of film and the recovery of historical memory: Vicente Aranda's works on the Spanish Civil War

This essay contrasts the popular and artistically-respected films of the Catalan director Vicente Aranda, who is considered friendly to the legacy of Spanish anarchism, with other recent and past films on the Spanish civil war of 1936–39. It describes and evaluates Aranda’s ‘war trilogy:’ Si te dicen que cai , 1989, ( The Fallen , re-released as Aventis ), the TV serial Los jinetes del alba , 1990 ( Riders of the Dawn ), and Libertarias , 1996.