4:00 PM
710 Social Sciences Building
Professors Ofelia Ferrán (Spanish and Portuguese) and Lisa Hilbink (Political Science):
"Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain: Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present"
The book brings together perspectives from history, political science, literary and cultural studies, forensic and cultural anthropology, international human rights law, sociology, and art. It puts these diverse fields in dialogue with each other to analyze the multiple legacies of Francoist violence in contemporary Spain, with a special focus on the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War and post-war era. In exploring the multifaceted nature of a society’s reckoning with past violence, the book speaks not only to those interested in contemporary Spain and Western Europe, but also to those studying issues of transitional and post-transitional justice in other national and regional contexts. In this presentation, Professors Ferrán and Hilbink will highlight three themes found across the various chapters: the hidden in plain sight/site nature of the legacies of Francoist violence; the classificatory limbo into which the Franco regime often falls due to its betwixt and between location in geopolitical time and space; and how Spanish society has begun to move away from the fear-driven “consensus” of the Transition era to a new, more democratic “contentious coexistence.”
