Embodying Memory In Contemporary Spain

This innovative book examines the emergence of a memory discourse in Spain since the millennium, taking as its point of departure recent grave exhumations and the Law of Historical Memory. The chapters focus on cultural products that interrogate the processes and pitfalls of traumatic remembrance. Through an analysis of exhumation photography, novels, films, television shows, and comics, the volume examines a substantial body of works in which there is a focus on overcoming the notion that Spanish history is pathological.

Review: Ribeiro de Menezes has accomplished a major task: to give a form to this debate and, thus, to provide us with a new tool to critically understand better contemporary Spain, including the process of political forces involved, the role of ideologies and the intellectuals, and to move now ahead into the future that is part of the very notion of memory as archive of history but also as an Utopian subtext.

This work is a lucid and highly precise tool of knowledge, a book that traces a model of reading the forces in dispute in order to construct a critical narrative. - Julio Ortega, Professor of Hispanic Studies, Brown University, USA