The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War
Abstract
The essay argues that modernity is best understood not as the cultural expression of capitalist modernization, but as a particular set of relations of present to past. It examines the varying attitudes toward the violent past of the civil war that have characterized Spain since the Franco dictatorship and continuing to the present day. The obsessive memorialization of the Nationalist war dead throughout the Franco dictatorship led, at the time of the transition to democracy, to a desire to break with the past; it was not, as is often argued, a determination to forget, but a decision not to let the past affect the future. Thus attempts toward the end of the Franco dictatorship to deal cinematically with this violent heritage were followed by a ten-year gap, until the appearance in the mid-1980s of a number of novels and films representing the civil war and their escalation since the late 1990s to create a memory boom, which has resulted in the publication of a large number of testimonies. The essay questions whether trauma theory, which has been so important in Holocaust studies, provides an adequate model for understanding the belated appearance of these memories, arguing that the reason is more likely to be a previous lack of willing interlocutors. Nevertheless, it concludes that the present urge to recount every detail of the past is less effective in communicating the horror of the war and its repression than are those accounts—in film at the end of the dictatorship and in fiction in the mid-1980s, with occasional more recent examples—which acknowledge the difficulty of narrativizing the violent past as well as the importance of transgenerational transmission.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Citations
Cites
Trauma: explorations in memory
(1996) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.33-3030 · Cited by 2,349
Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
Hirsch, M. (1997) · Cited by 2,294
Regarding the pain of others: Un commentaire
Sontag, S. (2003) · Diogène · doi:10.3917/dio.201.0127 · Cited by 2,038
Toews, J. E., & LaCapra, D. (1995) · The American Historical Review · doi:10.1086/ahr/100.1.128 · Cited by 736
Blood cinema: the reconstruction of national identity in Spain
(1994) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.32-0207 · Cited by 276
Ramos, J. (2001) · Duke University Press eBooks · doi:10.1215/9780822381099 · Cited by 188
Kinder, M. (1993) · University of California Press eBooks · doi:10.1525/9780520913479 · Cited by 181
The return of Civil War ghosts: The ethnography of exhumations in contemporary Spain
FERRÁNDIZ, F. (2006) · Anthropology Today · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2006.00437.x · Cited by 144
(2020) · Routledge eBooks · doi:10.4324/9781003086086 · Cited by 122
Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil española
Aguilar, P. (1996) · Virtual Defense Library (Ministerio de Defensa) · Cited by 120
Divergent modernities: culture and politics in nineteenth-century Latin America
(2002) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.39-2692 · Cited by 111
35. Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film
Higson, A. (2012) · University of Texas Press eBooks · doi:10.7560/742055-038 · Cited by 102
Eisenstadt, S. N. (2017) · Routledge eBooks · doi:10.4324/9781315124872-1 · Cited by 85
Jüliá, S., & Casanova, J. (1999) · Virtual Defense Library (Ministerio de Defensa) · Cited by 63
Usos amorosos de la postguerra espanola
Brown, J. L., & Gaite, C. M. (1988) · Hispanic Review · doi:10.2307/473643 · Cited by 59
Díaz, S. J. (2004) · Taurus eBooks · Cited by 54
Bird, R. J., & Cercas, J. (2002) · World Literature Today · doi:10.2307/40157488 · Cited by 47
La sonrisa de Falange : Auxilio Social en la guerra civil y en la posguerra
Cenarro, Á. (2006) · Virtual Defense Library (Ministerio de Defensa) · Cited by 46
The Films of Carlos Saura. The Practice of Seeing
Compitello, M. A., & D’Lugo, M. (1992) · Hispania · doi:10.2307/344114 · Cited by 46
Cultura herida : literatura y cine en la España democrática
Menor, C. M., Johson, R., & del Pino, J. M. (2002) · Ediciones Libertarias/Prodhufi eBooks · Cited by 42
Gentlemen, Bourgeois, and Revolutionaries
Villalón, J. C. (1996) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511528828 · Cited by 40
Fascist ModernitiesItaly, 1922-1945
Ben‐Ghiat, R. (2001) · University of California Press eBooks · doi:10.1525/california/9780520223639.001.0001 · Cited by 37
Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel
Miller, S. P., & Labanyi, J. (1991) · South Central Review · doi:10.2307/3189261 · Cited by 34
Self-citationChacón, D. (2006) · Cited by 32
Memoria histórica e identidad cultural : de la postguerra a la postmodernidad
Colmeiro, J. F. (2005) · Cited by 31
Memory beyond the Public Sphere: The Francoist Repression Remembered in Aragon
Lagunas, Á. C. (2002) · History and Memory · doi:10.1353/ham.2002.0004 · Cited by 19
Rodríguez, P. M. (2003) · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · Cited by 18
Carmen Martín Gaite: Usos amorosos de la postguerra española
Pope, R. D. (1989) · The Knowledge Bank (The Ohio State University) · Cited by 17
Subirats, E. (1981) · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · Cited by 13
Mujeres encarceladas : la prisión de Ventas, de la República al franquismo, 1931-1941
Holgado, F. H. (2003) · Cited by 12
Memory beyond the Public Sphere: The Francoist Repression Remembered in Aragon
Cenarro (2002) · History and Memory · doi:10.2979/his.2002.14.1-2.165 · Cited by 11
Quintais, L. (2001) · Journal of Romance Studies · doi:10.3167/147335301782485090 · Cited by 5
Montalbán, V. (1976) · Cited by 2
El miedo en la posguerra : Franco y la España derrotada : la política del exterminio
Duro, E. G. (2003) · Virtual Defense Library (Ministerio de Defensa) · Cited by 2
Heridos de la guerra: secuelas de la sublevación de Franco
Torres, R. (2003) · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · Cited by 1
Baroja, P. (1980) · Virtual Defense Library (Ministerio de Defensa) · Cited by 1
Research works printed but not linked: 11
- Caruth, Cathy 1995Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).
- 1996 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).
- 2004 Soldiers of Salamis, translated by Anne McLean (London: Bloomsbury).
- Graham, Helen, and Jo Labanyi, eds. 1995Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- Jelin, Elizabeth 2003State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
- 2000 Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- LaCapra, Dominick 1996Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
- 2001 Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press).
- Richard, Nelly 2004Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
- Richards, Michael 1998A Time of Silence: The Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- Sontag, Susan 2004Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin).
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Exhuming the defeated: Civil War mass graves in 21st‐century Spain
FERRÁNDIZ, F. (2013) · American Ethnologist · doi:10.1111/amet.12004 · Cited by 123
VOLVER: THE RETURN OF/TO TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE POLITICS IN SPAIN
Golob, S. R. (2008) · Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies · doi:10.1080/14636200802283647 · Cited by 65
Victims as moral beacons: victims and perpetrators in Northern Ireland
Brewer, J. D., & Hayes, B. C. (2011) · Contemporary Social Science · doi:10.1080/17450144.2010.534494 · Cited by 59
A Nation of Ghosts? : haunting, historical memory and forgetting in post-Franco Spain
Colmeiro, J. F. (2011) · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Cited by 56
Introduction: Time, Materiality, and the Work of Memory
Hamilakis, & Labanyi (2008) · History and Memory · doi:10.2979/his.2008.20.2.5 · Cited by 55
Metadata
- Authors
- Labanyi, J.
- Corresponding author
- Labanyi, Jo
- Venue
- Poetics Today
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2007-03-01
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 89-116
- ISSN
- 0333-5372 (ISSN-L)
- 1527-5507
- OpenAlex
- W2153526629
- Cited by
- 164
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 13 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 19 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 52.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Poetics Today (publishedVersion)
- HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Spanish Culture and Identity
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Memory, violence, and history
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Spanish History and Politics
- Keywords
- Spanish Civil War, collective memory, modernity, Francoism, democratic transition, memory boom, trauma theory, war dead memorialization, historical fiction, witness testimony, transgenerational transmission, coming to terms with the past
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review