Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Paul Preston is a renowned historian, and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on 20th-century Spanish history. His book on the genocidal actions taken against Spanish civilians between 1936 and 1945 is an important resource that has changed historiography on the period. From the perceived failures of the elected government to the rise of Francisco Franco and his subsequent authoritative takeover of Spain (that lasted 41 years), his book covers these events in painstaking detail. The ensuing, bloody civil war led to the death of hundreds of thousands, and the author carefully detailed every aspect of how the murders enfolded. Repression occurred on both sides, and Preston carefully laid out the origins of extermination in Spain, from the legacy of the Africanistas, to emerging genocidal rhetoric to finally murder on a massive scale. He has written a text that is masterly and authoritative in scope, seeking to place the extermination of the Spanish during this period in analysis of genocide. He quite evenly, detailed the crimes against humanity of both the left and the right as well as the subsequent concealment of the same. The radical rightists, the army, and even citizen mobs carried out mass acts of genocide against civilians who had been categorized, dehumanized, and purposely targeted for death. Preston, who in March 2012 speaking at the Embassy of Spain in London, argued that the Francoists, like Francisco Franco and other military – and civilian – conspirators killed more Spanish than the Nazis killed Germans.(1) Preston begins the text with a prologue that defends his use of the word holocaust in the title of the book, a decision, and his intent with selecting the word, will be discussed later in this review.

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-century Spain

Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain

This essay investigates whether the ‘trauma paradigm’ that has emerged in cultural theory is adequate to examine one of the most urgent political questions of our time: the question of state-sanctioned torture in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The first part explores whether the delight in aporia and paradox of much trauma theory is at odds with more urgent political imperatives to represent and circulate images of atrocity in torturous times. The second part investigates a number of cultural representations of trauma that have emerged outside the modernist trauma aesthetic, in particular looking at how Gothic tropes have been used in television and cinema to offer representational modes to debate torture. The study concludes with a reading of the film Pan's Labyrinth as an instance of how fantasy, Gothic and overdetermined historical traces have converged to navigate experience in an era of torture.

Beyond Trauma Torturous times

Geoffrey Batchen, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2009, 287 pp., US$29.95, ISBN-10: 0-262-01325-8 In the 1970s photography gained a firm foothold in the cultural and academic institutions of the West whe...

Photography degree zero: reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida

Traces of Contamination: Unearthing the Francoist Legacy in Contemporary Spanish Discourse

Catalonia has, from the nineteenth century to the present day, promoted a distinct culinary tourism. Travel and tourism practices have, as early as the eighteenth century, worked as powerful agents...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14753820.2020.1699346

Catalanidad in the Kitchen: Tourism, Gastronomy and Identity in Modern and Contemporary Barcelona

In 2007, I received from a colleague a small black book by Martí Llorens with a dozen or so photographs of the Spanish Civil War entitled Memorias revolucionarias (1999).1 I was, at the time, preparing a presentation on the topic of memory and the Spanish Civil War and was intrigued by how family stories and photographs moved from private to public spaces through the advocacy of surviving relatives, even becoming, in the case of personal belongings, desirable objects in the marketplace. This little black book seemed to offer the perfect example of such transformation: a few snapshots that clearly belonged to different family albums, united in a small collectable object. In these images, men and women are seen in photographs taken during the war, which later were sent home with personal notes. Together, this collection and the messages they contained represented a moving and easily recognizable tribute to those who participated in and (were) lost in the war. These snapshots made me reflect on what John Updike had written about this type of photographs, as he considered the appeal of these

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Visual Fictions and the Archive of the Spanish Civil War

Focusing on Leonardo Padura Fuentes's hard-boiled fiction, this essay traces the origin and evolution of the genre in Cuba. Padura Fuentes has challenged the officially sanctioned socialist literatura policial that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. creating a new model of criticism that is not afraid to confront the island's socio-economic problems. This article analyzes how in this novelist's tetralogy, the dominating rhetoric is one of scarcity, and how this constant state of lacking builds on the formulaic elements of the detective genre to reveal a social reality where crime (and its resolution) do not always have to do with the discovery of a dead body.

/pdf/hard-boiled-for-hard-times-in-leonardo-padura-fuentes-s-48xg0uxrwf.pdf

Hard-Boiled for Hard Times in Leonardo Padura Fuentes's Detective Fiction

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=spanish_pubs

H. Rosi Song

Papers

Traces of Contamination: Unearthing the Francoist Legacy in Contemporary Spanish Discourse

Catalanidad in the Kitchen: Tourism, Gastronomy and Identity in Modern and Contemporary Barcelona

Visual Fictions and the Archive of the Spanish Civil War

Hard-Boiled for Hard Times in Leonardo Padura Fuentes's Detective Fiction

Tracing the Past: An Introduction