Faber on Spain's Memory Wars, March 6, 4:30 pm, BH Steinberg Auditorium CMU

Lecture

History, Memory, Truth: Cultural Capital in Spain's Memory Wars
Sebastiaan Faber, Oberlin College

Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 4:30 pm
Baker Hall Steinberg Auditorium, A53
Reception following talk

Since the late 1990s, Spain has seen a series of public disputes over the
historical memory of the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War, Francoism,
and the Transition. Two main issues have been at stake in these “memory
wars”: the representation of the violent 20th-century past—how to tell the
story and who should tell it—and the relationship that today’s Spain should
have with that past. In the past fifteen years, there have been three major
shifts. The debates have moved from the private and academic into the public,
political, and judicial spheres; journalists, victims and their family members
have been displacing historians and other intellectuals as the main sources
of public discourse about the past; and in this discourse there is greater focus
on judgment, personal or collective experiences and an effort to read this
case in relation to World War II, the Cold War and the dictatorships in the
Southern Cone. My talk will analyze these shifts as struggles for authority and
legitimacy—for cultural capital—and focus in particular on the way notions
of truth have been invoked in these struggles.

(Sponsored by The Department of Modern Languages, The Department of History, & The Center
for Arts in Society)