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.

This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the multiple legacies of Francoist violence in contemporary Spain, with a special focus on the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War and post-war era. The various contributions frame their study within a broader reflection on the nature, function and legacies of state-sanctioned violence in its many forms. Offering perspectives from fields as varied as history, political science, literary and cultural studies, forensic and cultural anthropology, international human rights law, sociology, and art, this volume explores the multifaceted nature of a society’s reckoning with past violence. It speaks not only to those interested in contemporary Spain and Western Europe, but also to those studying issues of transitional and post-transitional justice in other national and regional contexts.

Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America isa collection of essays that explores historical memory at the intersection of political, cultural, social, and economic forces in the contexts of Spain and Latin America. The essays here focus on a variety of forms of memory—from the most concrete to the performative—that resist forgetting and unite individuals against hegemonic memory. The volume comprises four thematic sections that focus on Chile, Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Keeping in line with the concept informing this collection, that the past returns politically to haunt the present, the four sections move from the contemporary context to the colonial and pre-Columbian eras in Latin America. For all its diversity, the researchers’ interdisciplinary methodology displayed in this collection brings to light processes that would otherwise have remained illegible under a more narrow interpretative approach to historical memory. This volume focuses on the processes of remembering in geographies that have been transformed by violence and conflict in Spain and Latin America. In the cases investigated witnessing, trauma, and testimony speak to the urgency of truth and justice; historical memory, therefore, is ultimately a political act.

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.

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.

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.

This innovative book examines the emergence of a memory discourse in Spain since the millennium, taking as its point of departure recent grave exhumations and the "Law of Historical Memory." Through an analysis of exhumation photography, novels, films, television, and comics, the volume overturns the notion that Spanish history is pathological.