Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography by Sebastiaan Faber (review)

Sebastiaan Faber has moved steadily beyond writing for an academic audience and onto the pages of the popular print media in Spain. With pieces in FronteraD, CTXT: Contexto y Acción, Viento Sur, Público, and The Nation, Faber has transformed himself into the public voice of contemporary US Hispanism. He playfully reveals in the opening pages of Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography that he "didn't set out to become a polemicist" (5), but after unintentionally picking fights with Santos Juliá and Andrés Trapiello in the Spanish press midway through his career, Faber was surprised that anyone in Spain was paying any attention to him. He has since embraced these new media outlets as well as the accompanying notoriety wholeheartedly. With this book, Faber explicitly encourages Hispanists to step out of our self-imposed scholarly cages, challenging us to "question the very institutional foundations of our practice as scholars of the humanities" (3) by, essentially, asking ourselves what it means to be public intellectuals and why our work is important to an audience outside our narrow circle of sub-field specialists. It is a persuasive cri de coeur, one that Faber exemplifies in this book.

Faber's epiphany about his own scholarship came as he watched discussions about historical memory move out of the ivory tower and into the public sphere in Spain over the last two decades. The groundswell of interest in how the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco's dictatorship have been remembered, by whom, and in what venues, Faber observes, has invigorated the study of Spain, bringing new on-the-ground relevance to the field. According to Faber, Hispanists should formulate our own opinions and ideas about the memory transformation that has occurred in Spain since the early 2000s, no matter our nationality. Indeed, if our field is to survive, Faber writes, we must confront our own existential crises and dive into the fray. This is, perhaps, easier said than done, particularly for scholars who lack Faber's clout and standing in the field.

Nevertheless, Memory Battles aims to disrupt the typical academic monograph, just as Faber aims to disrupt the field of Iberian Studies. By taking a cultural studies approach to the revelations, disputes, and investigations of the Spanish Civil War—without pigeonholing himself into a stodgy format and style—Faber positions this book as twenty-first-century boundary-pushing scholarship. He largely succeeds in bringing some much-needed fresh air to the field of Hispanic Studies.

Keeping up with the controversies in the Spanish public sphere over how the country's divided past is remembered, adjudicated, and/or silenced is a full-time job. Faber picks out the juiciest nuggets and summarizes the ugliest fights in an effort to provide an overview, illustrated with captivating details and up-to-date examples, of what has been going on in what he calls Spain's "memory battles" over the past two decades. Faber covers a lot of ground: photography, intellectual debates, Spanish historiography, progressive activists and artists, and fictional interpretations. He introduces the reader to a who's-who of figures who have variously shaped how we understand Spain: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Paul Preston, Emilio Silva, Montse Armengou, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Ángel Viñas, Javier Cercas, and Javier Marías, to name only a few. Through profiles, analysis, and interviews, Memory Battles moves among time periods and genres to tell a story about the way Spain reckons with its own self-image and how it is seen from afar. This approach can at times feel disjointed, as the author reaches back and forth between the analog media of the Spanish Civil War period and the digital proliferation of the contemporary era to construct a notion of what it means to study history and memory in Spain today. Yet, by not lingering for too long on any one figure or topic, Faber also provides a wealth of starting points, a...