Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla. Hispanic Issues Edited by Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño (review)

Generally speaking, the more that we scrutinize the past the bulkier it tends to become. This is especially the case when we widen access to history beyond the institutional renderings of historians, whose disciplinary training often advises them to protect the past from unorthodox intrusions. Keith Windschuttle’s The Killing of History(1996) sums up this thinking with urgent passion and not a small amount of defensiveness. However, when previously unheard voices are able to enter the debate, when unknown facts emerge and perspectives change, the past can be expanded, shaped, and reinvigorated with new and diverse meanings. In other words, opening up the past allows it to be useful in ways not yet perceived.

In Spain over the past three decades or so, this is precisely what has happened with the Spanish Civil War—historians, novelists, memoirists, and numerous community and professional associations formed to recover historical memory have flourished. As a result, historical terrain has been covered more broadly and more deeply than perhaps could have been imagined when Francisco Franco died in 1975. But as often occurs when knowledge about the past grows and accumulates in a general way, smaller and discrete areas outside the mainstream often lag behind. Such has been the case with the study of the maquis in postwar Spain, about whom, as Carmen Moreno-Nuño points out in her introduction to Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla, there has yet to be devoted a book-length study focusing on representations of the guerrilla in both Francoist and democratic Spain. The essays gathered together by Moreno-Nuño and Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones in their jointly edited volume of Hispanic Issuesbegin to fill this lacuna in felicitous and intelligent fashion.

It is not that the figure of the maquis has been completely ignored in various forms of cultural production since the Civil War (one need only examine the record from Hemingway to Guillermo del Toro to come up with a lengthy and rich list of works) but, as Moreno-Nuño rightfully observes, the representation of the maquis has undergone significant transformations “in response to hegemonic sociopolitical models”(6) over the past seventy years. Indeed, the maquis has been ascribed a range of identities in response to an assemblage of perceived needs by one group or another in both Francoist and democratic Spain. The essays included in Armed Resistanceexplore a broad spectrum of these identities from multi-disciplinary approaches that focus on historiography, film, literature, and oral tradition.

Violence and armed resistance are always vexed by political, moral, and legal issues, and many of the essays address these problems at least implicitly, though they do not make them the principal focus of their analyses. What does stand out in the collection as a whole is the awareness of how stories and their tellers inevitably serve changing purposes over time. For example, in “Deep Space, Mobilized Time: The Anti-Francoist Guerrilla—Politics and Aesthetics of Armed Resistance (1938–1997),” Ulrich Winter examines political and aesthetic symbiosis as a temporal exigency. As he puts it, it is “clear how the paradigm of armed resistance as asymmetric warfare changed between war time, post-war time, and democracy” (6). He thus sees a kind of chronotopic transformation in stories about the maquis that reveals the need to continue the myths of anti-Francoism in order to make the past continually usable.

Several of the essays draw upon the centrality (and contingencies) of memory in the representation of armed resistance to Francoism: for example, “The Black Sun of Anarchy: From Historical Memory to Sinister Imagination (A Meditation on the Film El Honor de las Injuriasby Carlos García-Alix),” by Santiago Morales-Rivera; “The Magic Mountains: Narratives of Historical Memory, Folk Literature, and Communities of Memory in...