Since 1989, Spain has gone through a process of re-emergence of the memories of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francoism (1939-1975). These newly produced memories challenge the official reading of the civil war, as established during the transition to democracy, as a “collective insanity.” As part of this process, the last three decades have produced numerous novels, documentaries, and journalistic accounts that have brought to the fore the untold stories of the repression during the civil war and its aftermath.

This dissertation offers an analysis of the influence of transnational frameworks on the reconfiguration of the cultural memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. The selection of post-Cold War Spanish cultural texts – narrative fiction, documentary film, photography and journalism – being analyzed in this dissertation, is framed by three emblematic “spaces of transnational memory.” These are: the wars in former Yugoslavia; Forced Disappearance in the Southern Cone; and the remembrance of the Holocaust. Each of these spaces highlights a different contemporary site of agency in the production of memory, namely contemporary civil war, mass grave exhumations, and testimony. In addition, this dissertation posits affect and emotion as important mechanisms in the production of transnational memories.

This research argues that these transnational contexts of remembrance serve to reimagine Spain, proposing alternative and more “inclusive” forms of national memory and identity, often in opposition to the current Spanish “constitutional patriotism.” Transnational memory is located within the margins of the nation-state, a space of entanglement between the national and the transnational, and inhabited by those who were excluded from Spanish national identity through the forging of the Spanish nation-state.

 

Marije Hristova was a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University and a Marie Curie predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology of the Spanish National Research Council. Currently, she works as a lecturer of Dutch Studies at the University of Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria) and is a research fellow in the project “Below Ground,” led by Francisco Ferrándiz. .

 

Edited by Universitaire Pers Maastricht

 

The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’s argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.

The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.

A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

 

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books includeMaking Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Editado por Princeton University Press

 

PREMIOS:

One of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2015, selected by Alison Light
One of Flavorwire’s 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015
One of Flavorwire’s 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015

 

Disponible para su lectura: Introduction The Work of the Dead

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