The Power of Narrating and the Lost Paradise. Public polemics and the collective building of the past in Spain

Abstract

The past decade has seen an increasing interest on the part of the Spanish media and civil society in “historical memory”, marked, among other things, by a number of public debates on issues related to recent Spanish history (1931-1981). In these debates, academic historians have participated alongside other social actors, ranging from writers and filmmakers to citizen activists. The following essay analyzes one such drawn-out polemic that took place in the spring of 2010, in order to point to a series of structural problems, particularly the tendency on the part of opinion makers —including academic historians writing as media personalities— to monopolize the right to “tell the story of the past,” a claim based on a naïve invocation of scholarly historical knowledge as factual truth. The essay’s first part addresses the role of historians and academic history in the media. The second part analyzes the ethnocentric position of some Spanish liberal intellectuals faced with the internationalization of transitional justice. The third part takes a critical look at the way that Spain’s “media intellectuals” help to prevent a truly democratic mode of discussing the collective past.