Exhuming memory: Miguel Hernández and the legacy of fascism in Spain

Abstract

Each March in Orihuela in the province of Valencia, Spain, there is a festival of mural painting in honour of local poet Miguel Hernández. For long the poet, who died in a fascist jail in 1942, had been publicly unacknowledged, but now his life, his work and his political involvement as a Republican political activist are openly displayed. How Hernández is remembered provides a powerful example of the struggles between memory and forgetting in post-Franco Spain. Faced with the contradiction of a Pact of Forgetting in 1977 and a Historical Memory Law in 2007, memory in Spain has to be carefully exhumed from under layers of fascist policies and culture.

Post-Socialist Political Necromancy: Weaponization of Dead Bodies in Czech Culture Wars

“…The scholarly discussion focuses on the role and political relevance of dead bodies and their symbolism. This refers both to dead bodies in the sense of physical remains and their politically ritualized exhumations/reburials (Rolston and Berastegi 2018; Iturriaga 2019), and the political instrumentalization of dead bodies viewed in a more metaphorical sense, namely in terms of working with their legacy and symbolism. This is the direction and aim of the concept of political necromancy, which we elaborate on in this study and illustrate below with the example of political necromancers at the Liberation Festival in Pilsen.…”