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2 books match the query 'Post - Franco Spain'

cover of Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain

Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain

Silvia L. Lopez, Jenaro Talens, and Dario Villanueva, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume offers a sample of Spanish critical work in literary theory and cultural studies. Like all critical histories, Spain's is political: Philology dominated the critical scene during the Franco years, and after Franco, this hegemony has been contested by semiotics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminisms. Without trying to represent all the theoretical projects presently underway in Spanish criticism, this book opens a window on the vast field of new critical practices in Spain and provides a general picture of influential theoretical currents.

The essays collected here range widely in topic and style, and they reflect a new generation's preoccupation with critical problems that go beyond the field of literary studies. The authors focus on new discourse in various print and electronic media, on the discursive construction of the museum space, and on literary theory as it confronts issues of translation, subjectivity, writing, and narratology.

Silvia López is assistant professor of Spanish at Carlton Collegea doctoral candidate in the departments of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Jenaro Talens is professor of Hispanic literature and comparative literature at the University of Geneva. He is the author of The Branded Eye: Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, (Minnesota 1993). Darío Villanueva is professor of theory of literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

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cover of Not Just Bodies: Forensic Activism in Post-Franco Spain

Not Just Bodies

Forensic Activism in Post-Franco Spain

Jonah S. Rubin

Vanderbilt University Press, 2027

Not Just Bodies is an ethnography of one of Spain’s most successful activist movements: the ongoing effort to locate and exhume the more than 130,000 persons disappeared during the 1936–1975 Franco dictatorship. Just two decades ago, public mention of these victims of the Spanish dictatorship was unofficially but effectively censored, widely perceived as a threat to the foundational accords of Spanish democracy. Today, they are a central feature of electoral campaigns, nightly news, and cultural productions. Not Just Bodies examines the often-surprising ways activists and relatives of the disappeared deployed forensic science to achieve such a dramatic change in the ways Spaniards understand what it means to live in a post-fascist democracy.

Although Spanish exhumations follow the same technical protocols as those of their international peers, the context in which these forensic tools are applied is remarkably different. Whereas the Latin American exhumations that inspired Spaniards occurred as part of state-led post-conflict programs of truth and reconciliation, in Spain a policy of amnesty and amnesia have foreclosed the possibility of achieving justice. Removed from this original context as part of state-led transitional justice processes, forensic exhumation becomes more than just a means of extracting data about past human rights crimes from victims’ corpses—it exists as a powerful method through which activists reassess post-fascist democracy and build pressure toward social change. By inserting the deceased into transnationally circulating scientific, medical, and legal discourses, Spanish activists alter the status of the dead, transforming them into disappeared persons whom the state has a moral and legal obligation to recover.
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