Abstract: “This dossier displays a selection of the work presented during the last six years in the permanent international seminar Faces and Traces of Violence/Rastros y rostros de la violencia held monthly at ILLA-CCHS-CSIC. […] Since its beginning, the seminar has been a space for public and academic debate, and its main objective has been the development of critical, comparative and interdisciplinary analyses of different manifestations of violence (especially political and war-related violence) both historically and in the present moment, as well as the development of careful reflections regarding the intricate memory politics that have emerged as a result the contingent reactivation of these violent acts, both in the past and the present. […] The seminar sessions have witnessed lively debates on topics including the following: militaristic representations of the world; memory and mourning in Argentina and Chile; the role of forensic science in the investigation of political violence; the connections between memory, philosophy and theater; the cinematographic recycling of political violence; the forms and meaning of poetry in post-war contexts; the “transnationalization” of forced disappearances and other victimhood models; the use of media in peace-building; the gray areas of the Gypsy Holocaust; the effects of transitional justice policies in post-war Bosnia; the structural violence affecting border crossings in Northern Mexico; how material objects elicit memory in traumatic contexts; the evolution of contemporary memory politics in Spain and Latin America; transnational memory practices and identity politics in contemporary El Salvador; the social and political effects of confessions of perpetrators in the framework of truth commissions; the development of a memory “market” in Latin America; the relationship between human rights and copy rights; the painful re-elaboration of Nazism and the horrors of the Second World War in Austria and Germany; the role of the new media in the creation of new modalities of witnessing and victimhood; the contemporary management of the corpses of mass violence; the role of ruins in the making of national memories; the bureaucratic aftermath of massacres in Colombia; and the memorial processes linked to exiles, diasporas and genocides. Or, as displayed in this dossier’s selection of articles, the seminar has also touched upon other equally diverse topics such as the configuration of cosmopolitan memories on a global scale after the Holocaust; the critical analysis of the tropes and narratives used both in historiography and public debates to define Europe’s violent twentieth century; the shocking aftermath of the experience of the Soviet Gulag for some Bolshevik loyalists; the emergence of global memoryscapes in France; the politics behind the non-remembrance of the Holocaust in Hungary; the attempts to deal with the legacy of the dictatorship in Portugal; the impact of mass grave exhumations from the Spanish Civil War in the reactivation of conflicting memories of the conflict; the difficulties in accessing and making sense of the archives of violence in the aftermath of Spanish dictatorship; the tensions between memorial places and national heritage in post-Pinochet Chile; and the enormous power of forced disappearances to disrupt the social fabric in contemporary Mexico. […]”

Francisco Ferrándiz (ILLA-CCHS, CSIC)

Culture & History Digital Journal

Resumen : En este libro se resume la información generada a partir de las investigaciones llevadas a cabo en el cementerio del Fuerte de San Cristóbal del monte Ezkaba. Pruebas que han sido obtenidas formalmente y que revelan la enorme injusticia sufrida por miles de presos republicanos encerrados en los húmedos subterráneos de esta fortificación militar. Derrotados y enfermos, la dictadura franquista los mantuvo encarcelados haciendo sufrir además a sus familias, también convertidas en víctimas. Una injusticia sostenida en el tiempo que no ha encontrado reparación por el abandono institucional, que niega el derecho a la memoria de las víctimas y que ignora la importancia del deber de memoria de la sociedad. Las exhumaciones realizadas nos han permitido acercarnos a esos presos que nunca regresaron a sus casas y murieron por las malas condiciones higiénicosanitarias, el abandono y por el hambre de una posguerra atroz para quienes habían defendido la legalidad republicana. La fuga que protagonizaron y la acumulación de vivencias que van surgiendo de la mano de las familias nos exigen ahora un compromiso por la divulgación de esta información, que permanecía encerrada y enterrada entre las paredes de la prisión en total oscuridad. En cualquier lugar del mundo, el Fuerte de San Cristóbal sería un lugar de memoria y por ello va a resultar necesario iniciar un debate público sobre su futuro en el que se tengan en cuenta todas las opiniones y especialmente la de los protagonistas de esta historia. Este libro pretende contribuir al conocimiento de una verdad ocultada. Que vea la luz, que aflore lo escondido

Editorial: Pamiela.
Ciudad: Iruña.
ISBN: 9788476818404
Páginas: 432

Abstract: Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history, and textual sources.
Editorial: Cambridge University Press