"Professor Tobin Stanley's Francoist Repression and Incarceration in Contemporary Spanish Culture is an essential addition to the field of memory studies in contemporary Spain. Her close readings of literary and filmic texts-both well-known (El lápiz del carpintero, Pa negre, La voz dormida, El lector de Julio Verne)-and lesser-known (the biopic Ángel, Si ha los tres años no he vuelto, the documentary El silencio de otros)-is combined with a solid critical and theoretical approach to provide the reader with profound insights into this crucial topic of justice through memory." -Thomas Deveny, Professor Emeritus, McDaniel College, Maryland, USA This book examines the cultural articulation of Spanish History (and histories (remembered, meaningful experiences). It analyzes how real people and fictional characters experience the rupture of post-war repression, as their vindicating collective memory counters the authoritarian narrative and laws that demonized and criminalized them. The book, that breaks the persistent cycle of denial of Francoist malfeasance, is a resource for scholars and students who research the representation of Spain's dictatorship, its aftermath and the recovery of postdictatorial memory. Maureen Tobin Stanley is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, USA. She has published two co-edited volumes with Palgrave Macmillan, Exile through a Gendered Lens: Women's Displacement in Recent European History, Literature, and Cinema (2012) and Female Exiles in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Europe (2007), and two co-edited anthologies, Hybridity in Spanish Culture (2011) and (Re)collecting the Past: Historical Memory in Spanish Literature and Culture (2016).

This book examines the cultural articulation of Spanish History (and histories (remembered, meaningful experiences). It analyzes how real people and fictional characters experience the rupture of post-war repression, as their vindicating collective memory counters the authoritarian narrative and laws that demonized and criminalized them. The book, that breaks the persistent cycle of denial of Francoist malfeasance, is a resource for scholars and students who research the representation of Spain’s dictatorship, its aftermath and the recovery of postdictatorial memory.

"Exposing two general perspectives, both manifestations of an authoritarian past that still holds a relationship with the present, this collection reveals the ideological legacy of the past and its experience as a distressing conditioner of the present. The dissonant elements of post-Franco discourse critically analyzed by our contributors challenge the seamless narrative that tells the successful story of the Spanish transition to democracy."--BOOK JACKET.

Judge Baltasar Garzon achieved international prestige in 1998 when he pursued the perpetrators of crimes committed in Argentina against Spanish citizens and began proceedings for the arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet. But, when Garzon transferred his attention to his Spanish homeland, he was put on trial for opening an investigation into crimes committed by Francoists. As a result, in 2012, he found himself on the point of being expelled from the judiciary. The Garzon case is neither so absurd nor so difficult to understand if the record of the Spanish judiciary is examined through the prism of a series of representative cases since the transition to democracy. Key to this examination is the way the judiciary has dealt with those who have investigated cases of people murdered by the military rebels from July 1936 onwards. This book relates 13 judicial cases that took place between 1981 and 2012. They range from the banning of the documentary film Rocio by Fernando Ruiz Vergara, because it named the person responsible for one of the massacres in southwest Spain, to the recent trial of Judge Garzon. The judicial outcome in each case reflected the prejudices and ideology of the judge in charge. The Francoist repression still constitutes a dead weight in Spanish politics as heavy as the gravestone that covers the remains of the dictator in the Valle de los Caidos. The nature of the transition from autocracy to democracy has made it difficult to overcome a black past that not even the post-Franco democratic governments (Rodriguez Zapatero's "memory" policy included) have dared confront. The potential defrocking of Judge Garzon puts the Spanish polity/judiciary back in the realm of Franco's end-of-year message on December 30, 1969, with what became the nautical catch-phrase of his twilight years: "all is lashed down and well lashed down" ("todo ha quedado atado, y bien atado").

By the end of the Spanish Civil War in March of 1939, almost 500,000 Spaniards had fled Francisco Franco's newly established military dictatorship. More than 275,000 refugees in France were immediately interned in hastily constructed concentration camps, most of which were located along the open shorelines of France's southernmost beaches. This book chronicles the cultural memory of this war refugee population whose stories as camp inmates in the early 1940s remain largely unknown, unlike the wide dissemination of the literature and testimony of the survivors of Nazi death camps. The hidden history of France's seaside camps for Spanish Republicans spawned a rich legacy of cultural works that dramatically demonstrate how a displaced political community began to reconstitute itself from the ruins of war, literally from the sands of exile. Combining close textual analyses of memoirs, poetry, drama, and fiction with a carefully researched historical perspective, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire Investigates how the most significant literature of the early post-civil war exile period appropriated the concentration camp as a discursive vehicle.

Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the “long” Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.

Gema Pérez-Sánchez argues that the process of political and cultural transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain can be read allegorically as a shift from a dictatorship that followed a self-loathing "homosexual" model to a democracy that identified as a pluralized "queer" body. Focusing on the urban cultural phenomenon of la movida, she offers a sustained analysis of high queer culture, as represented by novels, along with an examination of low queer culture, as represented by comic books and films. Pérez-Sánchez shows that urban queer culture played a defining role in the cultural and political processes that helped to move Spain from a premodern, fascist military dictatorship to a late-capitalist, parliamentary democracy. The book highlights the contributions of women writers Ana María Moix and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as comic book artists Ana Juan, Victoria Martos, Ana Miralles, and Asun Balzola. Its attention to women's cultural production functions as a counterpoint to its analysis of the works of such male writers as Juan Goytisolo and Eduardo Mendicutti, comic book artists Nazario, Rubén, and Luis Pérez Ortiz, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.