Affiliative Acts and Postmemory: Unresolved Questions

Abstract

The rise of memory studies in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the so-called "moda de la memoria" in contemporary Spanish cultural production—with a marked presence of works about the violent episodes of the country's twentieth-century history and their enduring legacies—has given rise to a surge of academic analyses of that cultural production—novels, films, documentaries—by specialists in contemporary Iberian literature and culture. Many of these analyses draw on theoretical bodies from other, or at least neighboring, fields: philosophy and social sciences (from Maurice Halbwachs, Reyes Mate, and Paul Ricoeur to Paloma Aguilar and Elizabeth Jelin) and humanistic approaches to Holocaust Studies (from Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra to James Young y Marianne Hirsch). In view of this recent production by literary and cultural critics, this essay seeks to accomplish two tasks: to determine to what extent the analysis of individual texts and movies contributes to our understanding of general sociopolitical phenomena such as collective memory and transitional justice; and to clarify some fundamental differences between the historical memory of the victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism, on the one hand, and those of the Holocaust, on the other. Given these differences, a notion such as affiliative (post)memory does not mean the same thing in both contexts.