3 Public objects of remembering and forgetting in contemporary Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT Richards’s article is a reflection on comparative history inspired by the pulling down of the statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020. It explores the evolution in Spain of state policies and civil society activism to do with public spaces and symbolic objects related to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. First, the performative element of the Bristol protest invites analogy with celebrations in public spaces of the arrival through the ballot box in 1931 of the reforming Second Republic, a democratic regime subsequently overthrown in the civil war. Second, the dialectic of remembering and forgetting British imperialism and the slave trade is compared to the struggle to make the past visible in post-war Spain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing the concealed past into open discourse in Spain through civil society activism since 2000 has been focused on three elements: making public the affective consequence of significant objects; gaining the support of politicians with access to the state; and broadening youthful activism to encompass supranational needs based on human rights and the environment. The argument is that conflict over collective memory in the twenty-first century is largely one between backward-looking narratives of the nation and forward-oriented ideas and practices that eclipse the national by linking the local and the global.