Radical Nostalgia: : Spanish Civil War Commemoration in by Peter Glazer

By Peter Glazer

Nostalgia can function a necessary device within the emotional reconstitution and maintenance of suppressed histories, instead of sentimentally privileging the previous on the price of current issues and restricting a culture's revolutionary capability. among 1936 and 1938, responding to an army coup in Spain led by way of Francisco Franco with the help of either Hitler and Mussolini, over 2700 US anti-fascists joined 30,000 volunteers from world wide to shape the overseas Brigade. They got here jointly to shield the democratically elected Spanish govt in contrast early manifestation of the fascist Axis. After 3 bloody years, Franco's uprising succeeded, and his dictatorship lasted till his loss of life in 1975. From the instant the 1st American volunteers back domestic, and to at the present time, they've been retaining commemorative occasions recalling the fight. for almost seventy years, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade have mentioned and re-cited their activist prior in theatrically eclectic, hugely emotional commemorative performances, a website for either nostalgia and innovative politics. Literary recitations, scripted dramaticpieces, songs, motion pictures, images, and megastar appearances were juxtaposed with speeches, fundraising, and a rigorous recognition to urgent political and social matters of the day. The heritage and content material of those occasions is precise and analyzed the following in response to a mixture of archival and ethnographic proof. The exemplary position of songs from the warfare, as either nostalgic triggers and old artifacts, is additionally tested. Commemorations of the Spanish Civil struggle have supplied worthy anchors for a interval in US historical past whilst perspectives now suggestion severe have been an authorised a part of mass political discourse. via this wealthy, inter-generational functionality perform, a marginalized, vernacular political minority has deployed radical nostalgia as an important corrective to an respectable tradition disinterested in America's leftist prior, and threatened through its implications.

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Extra resources for Radical Nostalgia: : Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America

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11 Nostalgia is a product of the present. ”12 Susan Stewart acknowledges that “[n]ostalgia [. 15 Still, it continues to embody 36 Radical Nostalgia a sense of separation and loss. 16 The home those ailing eighteenthcentury soldiers craved was geographically distant, but, it could be argued, it was the emotional stability and comforting embrace of that inaccessible familiar/familial landscape they both lacked and desired. Veterans of the Spanish Civil War looking back on the 1930s crave the comradeship, shared effort, and sense of hope and purpose they had found in those years, and in Spain.

Bertolt Brecht was famous both for his historical dramas and for his theory that traditional Aristotelian catharsis would purge an audience of any sense of social responsibility after a play was over, but even Brecht did not assume a complete Nostalgia and Commemoration 41 excision of emotionality from his politically provocative epic theater:37 Apparently emotions accompanying social progress will long survive in the human mind as emotions linked with interests, and in the case of works of art will do so more strongly than might have been expected [.

31 Whatever the specific motivations of the volunteers, Spain was the first country to hold off fascist military action, and a place where avowed antifascists could truly make a difference. “The resistance of the Spanish people and their allies to international fascism represented the last opportunity to avert the global calamity of World War II,” according to historian and American volunteer Arthur H. 32 Despite the efforts of the Non-Intervention Committee, Spain became an international cause, the first true battleground for the most significant and deadly ideological conflict of the century.

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