In The End of the Future, author Bartholomew Dean broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memory's role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of violent attempts by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA) to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin.

To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, this book relies on the written works and testimony of Sístero García Torres, an MRTA rebel commander; the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; MRTA propaganda; media accounts; and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, Indigenous notions of "justice" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal well-being, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.

Examining rhetorical engagement with difficult topics

Museums offer an opportunity to reenvision rhetorical education through their address of hard, discomforting histories that challenge visitors to confront traumatic events and work toward a better future. While both museum studies and rhetoric center the audience in their scholarship and practices, this volume engages across and between these disciplines, allowing for a fuller theorization and enactment of rhetorical education’s connections to social justice. Engaging Museums works to fill gaps between the fields of rhetoric and social justice by going beyond classrooms to sites of public memory represented in museums.
 
This volume presents three distinct, diverse case studies of recently established historical museums taking on the rhetorically complex tasks of representing traumatic events: the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the National World War I Museum, and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Through rhetorical and comparative analysis of data collected from the museums and intersectional transdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter theorizes aspects of rhetoric—namely identification, collectivity, and memory—bringing rhetorical theory more firmly into current conversations surrounding civic engagement and social justice. 
 
Obermark’s weave of voices and perspectives concludes with a critical focus on how memory may serve as a generative pedagogical topos for both public rhetoric and university-based rhetoric and writing classrooms. This book helps scholars, students, and teachers bring what museums do—difficult, complicated pedagogical work representing hard history—back inside the classroom and further into our civic discourse.
 

Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism.

This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.