Welcome to My New Blog

For over a year now, I have maintained a blog on the memory of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in contemporary Spain. I have no immediate plans to stop posting to that blog, (Re) Generando Memorias. In fact, I am more active there now than at any other time.

I am beginning "Memory, Amnesia and Politics" with the hope of expanding or supplementing my first blog, as well as reaching a more largely English-speaking audience [a majority of visitors to (Re) Generando Memorias are from Spain]. For now, the goal of this blog will be to post relevant news items on the ways in which history, memory and politics interact. At the time, I do not plan to offer much commentary. As was the case with my first blog, this is also an experiment and comes out of a class I plan to offer next semester.

During spring semester 2010, I will teach an honors seminar in English which adopts a Memory Studies approach in looking at the ways we construct personal, familial and national narratives about traumatic historical events. Because the course is only offered for half the semester, we must limit our readings; our main focus will be on 9-11, the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War. Some of the primary texts I am considering are Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers and Maus. Theoretical readings will come from Freud, Dori Laub, Marianne Hirsch and Susan Sontag, among others. We will also address amnesia and forgetting, appealing to Paul Connerton's recent article in Memory Studies, "Seven Types of Forgetting." In all the talk about memory and trauma, we often omit a more productive discussion of the ways in which narratives come about via the processes of forgetting.

Jenny Edkins, the author of Trauma and the Memory of Politics, says elsewhere, "memory is not an add-on to the study of politics." It is this central idea on which this blog is founded. We cannot understand what is happening in our political system without taking a critical look at how those in power appeal to memory and forgetting -- perhaps, particularly in relation to traumatic historical events -- in order to promote or displace certain agendas.