In the Name of the Martyrs
ABSTRACT This article explores how the Francoist victors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) remembered their dead. Eschewing a top-down approach alone, it also looks at the reception and production of memory from below. In this way, the article shows how many of the Francoist bereaved both came to identify with and gained solace from the regime's message that it was involved in a sacred struggle against centre and left political groups. Moreover, many ordinary Francoists came to believe that taking part in the repression of those from the defeated side could offer a way of honouring their dead.
The Necropolitics of Spain’s Civil War Dead
Ribeiro de Menezes explores the political life of Spain’s Civil War dead in terms of the necropolitics that have shaped public memory and amnesia. Proposing that memory horizons are constantly shifting according to the demands and concerns of the present, the author offers a reading of the main commemorations of those who died in the war—including the iconic stories of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and Federico Garcia Lorca—before noting that remembrance goes hand in hand with forgetting. Celebrated victims can be read within particular paradigms which obscure other victims and war dead. Ribeiro de Menezes thus concludes with a reflection on Moroccan soldiers who fought on both sides in the war and whose memory has been largely ignored in recent memory discussions.
Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes and Secular Religion in the Italian Case
Recent years have seen significant advances in our understanding of various European fascisms and their cultural and intellectual underpinnings.1 These advances derive in part from our distance from the historical experience itself, the emotional power of which hindered as well as enriched 'classical approaches' to the subject. But with these advances have also come certain over-reactions as well as problems that persist without solution. To sort out what we now know and what we still need to know about the relation of fascism to the