Excavating a hidden past:’ The forensic turn in Spain’s collective memory

The book Excavating Memory gives an overview of historical and sociocultural approaches to memory as a contested social practice in the present rather than as a passive recollection of the past. Lore Colaert wrote a chapter on forensic exhumations as a part of transitional justice processes worldwide. Her case study discusses how a recent memory movement in Spain uses exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War era and Francoist dictatorship to break Spain’s “pact of forgetting.”

L. Colaert (2016), ’Excavating a hidden past:’ The forensic turn in Spain’s collective memory’, in M. T. Starzmann and J. R. Roby, Excavating memory: Material Culture Approaches to Sites of Remembering and Forgetting, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.