SPAN 325 | Remembering a Violent Past

How is the past refashioned to appeal to the political present? How are dominant narratives about the past solidified, contested and/or reimagined? And what are the silences that the drive to "recuperate" a silenced past paradoxically produces? Debates over how to memorialize---or not---a conflictive past are at the forefront of political discussions today, ranging from the renaming of buildings to the revision of history textbooks. This course utilizes Spain's politics of memory as a case study to explore how contemporary societies grapple with the memory of a recent violent past. The first part of the course is devoted to a series of transatlantic cultural artifacts that constructed the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as an international battle against Fascism. The second half is dedicated to how post-dictatorial Spain (from 1975 to present) remembers competing accounts of the past.