Shadows of the Past in Spain: Historical Policy and Collective Memory of Civil War and Francism

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of public memory about the civil war of 1936 – 1939 and the Francoist dictatorship in Spain. Another focus of the research is an analysis of the difficulties and contradictions associated with the transformations of the Spanish state historical policy, including the problems resulting from the adoption of a new law on democratic memory in the country. For twenty years, issues of memory have invariably been present in the Spanish political discourse and affect the daily life of Spaniards. This situation has been accompanied by significant media attention and wide media coverage. Numerous references to the themes of memory and the difficult past are often superficial and do not reveal the essence of the problem, forming a horizontal informational reflection that gives the illusion of saturation. The authors, analyzing the relationship of the Spaniards with their past, apply the comparative method in the context of four historical stages — the period of the Francoist dictatorship, the stage of democratic transition, democratic Spain in the 1980s – 1990s, and Spain of the 21st century. The conducted research allows us to assert that one important characteristic of the Spanish case is the lack of social consolidation and acceptance of the policy of public memory on a democratic basis. This reveals the difficulty of building a social and political consensus around the policy of memory. Turning to the history of the issue of the return of memory and noting the desire of the left political forces for a historical revenge, the authors of the article conclude that it is impossible to present a single correct presentation of democratic memory. Using the example of the denial of both the Francoist memory and the revolutionary memory of the anarchist movement, the article argues the specific character of democratic memory as a cultural phenomenon: democratic memory is multiple, it reflects and presents various interests of many social actors and does not have an exclusively liberal-democratic character.

“History is Illuminating”: Public memory crises and collectives in Richmond, Virginia

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and calls to remove Confederate statuary in Richmond, Virginia, during the summer of 2020, the History Is Illuminating project constructed public signs that replicated the traditional historical markers used throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. The signs were placed along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue in conversation with the still-standing Confederate monuments. They challenged the monuments’ representation of public memory by re-introducing narratives about prominent Black Richmonders and informing readers of the Jim Crow legislation that enabled the monuments to be constructed and venerated. This edited and condensed interview with organizers from the project describes the multiple crises of collective memory that public historians confront in the American South, as well as the strategies the History Is Illuminating project used to counter dominant narratives about public memory. Finally, the interview highlights the importance of community action and a multiplicity of public memory projects in order to ensure a democratic approach to collective memory.

New Trends in the Field of Public Memory

The article analyzes the forms of public memory in the field of historical, cultural and scientific heritage on the example of commemorative practices in the Novosibirsk Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The source basis was the historiographic and information resource of publications about the SB RAS, the materials of the electronic open archive of the SB RAS, the results of the method of included observation. The methodological basis is the socio-cultural approach, the provisions on T. Shola’s mnemosophy. We consider the resonant commemorative events of 2020–2021 dedicated to the leaders of the Siberian Branch M. A. Lavrentiev, N. N. Yanenko, N. N. Pokrovsky, T. I. Zaslavskaya, doctor of philology M. I. Cheremisina, the builder of the Akademgorodok of the Novosibirsk Scientific Center general N. M. Ivanov. Conclusions are drawn that the sphere of public memory is an important component of the socio-cultural framework of the territory of the “scientific topos”. Novosibirsk Akademgorodok is a complex innovative form of public memory that configures the socio-cultural environment for the tasks of commemoration. The calendar-anniversary principle of commemoration of memorable dates is complemented by the logic of spiritual attachment to the heritage of significant personalities. The line between institutional and private initiatives and partnerships is being blurred. There is a further rethinking of the contribution and significance of the leaders of science. In various forms of public memory, social orientation, social activism, and moral agentivity are noted. The practical value of generalizing and algorithmizing the experience of commemoration is due to the importance of the socio-cultural function of the sphere of public memory in creating a semantic space of social myth-making, which significantly affects the life of society, the accumulation of historiographic and information resources for the successful implementation of national projects related to the modernization of science and education in the face of great challenges of modernity.

Burning Karen’s headquarters: Gender, race, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy

In the early morning hours of 31 May 2020 in Richmond, Virginia, along with graffiti to the monuments lining the city’s historic Monument Avenue, the nearby headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was covered in colorful graffiti and set aflame. This article explores the gendered and raced critiques of the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s memory work communicated by this protest action, using the “Karen meme” as its point of departure. Invocations of “Karen” on Twitter in response to the Richmond protest made pointed arguments about narrative, place, and aesthetics, critiquing not only the Daughters’ role in remembering the Confederacy but the “Southern lady” trope within American public memory. Rather than an oblique reference, the Karen meme, this article argues, underscored Twitter’s potential as a site of anti-racist resistance during times of crisis.

The monumentalization of the Portuguese Colonial War: Commemorating the soldier’s efforts amid the persistence of imperial imaginaries

This article presents an analysis of the monumentalization of the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974) and explores the dynamics that sustain its growth recently, while other symbols and forms of public memorialization associated with the colonial past have increasingly been called into question and contested, nationally and internationally. Through the semiotic and epigraphic analysis of monuments, observational visits and interviews with some of the people who put them up, the main representational dynamics of the approximately 415 monuments in Portugal are identified. The article examines the (under)-representation in black troops of the Portuguese Army, the boom in monument construction (over 350) from the year 2000 onward and the maintenance (and reinforcement from 2010 onward) of messages and visual narratives projecting a sort of imperial imaginary. This work shows how the vernacular remembering and the public memory of the conflict and the colonial past are reflected on the monuments’ representations and images.

The Politics of Calendars: State Appropriations of the Contested Iranian Past

This paper seeks to investigate how commemorative practices, rituals, and holidays are invented, deployed, and recast for political and ideological purposes, to reinforce and sustain a particular narrative of national identity. It argues that the choice of particular moments of a country’s past to be commemorated in calendars as national holidays and the way in which the collective past is preserved and remembered both reflect and articulate a country’s vision of its present essence, of who its people are. Recognizing the link between the collective memory and national identity, the Iranian states before and after the 1979 revolution made a special effort to articulate their narrative of the past by commemorating a particular set of holidays and rituals. Viewing the calendar as a political artifact, this paper compares changes in the Iranian national calendars in the Pahlavi era (1925–1979) and the Islamic Republic (1979–2018). It examines the inclusion of new religious holidays and the removal of national days associated with the monarchy as well as the assignment of new meanings and celebratory practices to the old ones as the signifiers of a political maneuver to articulate a new shared public memory and narrative of identity since the 1979 revolution. It then examines two nationwide celebrations before and after the 1979 revolution, representing two state-sponsored, competing narratives of Iranian identity: firstly, the 2500-year celebration of the Persian Empire in 1953, and, secondly, the Ashura commemoration, a religious gathering dedicated to the remembrance of Shia Imams. These commemorations provided the state a unique political opportunity to present its own appraisal of the past and, in turn, national identity.

Sacred (re)Collections

This article discusses how state-organized, memory-cultural production drawing on religious signifiers contributes to a sacralization of Turkish public memory institutions and public space. This reinforces an Islamic-nationalist imagination of contemporary Turkey. The article explores state-led, disciplinary interventions in museal space (the Sacred Trusts exhibition of relics at Topkapı Palace Museum) and commemorative ritual in public space, display and education (the rise, fall and recalibration of Holy Birth Week (Kutlu Doğum Haftası). Drawing on theories of symbolic politics, nationalism, memory and space, the article elucidates the sacralization of Turkish memory production as a contesting yet malleable negotiation of nationalism. Innovative Islamic memory practice and ritualization requires careful discursive and disciplinary boundary drawing, catering to theological sensitivities and Sunni-orthodox mores. Then again, the spatial boundaries between various memory-cultural domains are becoming less distinct. Today, Islamic-nationalist imaginaries surface in the interstices of public memory institutions, public education and everyday public space.