Lorraine Ryan

Memory, power and resistance: The anatomy of a tripartite relationship:

The need to examine the individual response to collective memory narratives has been continually emphasized in the nascent discipline of memory studies.This article examines the relationship between collective memory, power and resistance. In so doing, it seeks to establish a typology of mnemonic resistance, that is, to ascertain the modes by which collective memory may be resisted by the individual or a minoritarian, repressed group. The author contends that this resistance is two fold, dependent on both individual resignification, and the nature of collective memory itself, which, unwittingly, because of its necessarily nebulous character, the not inconsequential influence of both individual reception and generational change in its construction and reception, facilitates its own subversion. Collective memory, therefore, is always negotiated at the interface between the imposition of a public dominant narrative and the reaction of the private individual.

The sins of the father: The destruction of the Republican family in Franco's Spain

The postwar years in Spain were little more than the perpetuation of the Civil War on an ideological terrain, as the Franco Regime consistently vilified the memory of the Second Republic and remorselessly persecuted the defeated Republicans. In fact, nationalist diatribes against communism and its attendant ills of separatism and laicism were invariably expounded in medical terminology, referring as they did to the “cancer” and “virus” which had devastated the nation during the Civil War. This empirically unverifiable theory sustained that a large scale extermination (the Civil War) had to be carried out to rid Spain of this “virus” thus preempt the contagion of this fervently Catholic and patriotic nation. Horkheimer affirms that the family is the microcosm of the fascist state, as the relationship between siblings and parents replicates the obedience of the citizen to the fascist state. As Republican traits were at antipodes to the prescribed national attributes, the Francoist State sought to destroy the Republican family by a myriad of measures such as the inculcation of a zealous National Catholicism in their children, which in turn precipitated both selfhatred and the childrens outright rejection of their parents. However, the social persecution of the defeated transcended indoctrination: in the postwar years, the horrendousness of life for the Republicans was compounded by the States quasi reconversion policy, which resulted in Republican children being forcibly removed from their homes, and been adopted by pro-Francoist families, or in many cases, rehoused by religious orders which, within a decade, witnessed a huge increase in the number of supposed orphans becoming seminarists. In this article, I intend to elaborate on both the means by which the Francoist State eradicated the Republican family, and its long-term consequences.

The Economic Degeneration of Masculinity in Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla

Rafael Chirbess En la orilla has been proclaimed as “la novela de la crisis,” and it has garnered an impressive amount of distinction in the short length of time since its publication in May 2013. It was voted the 2013 novel of the year by readers of El País, and in January 2014 it won the Premio Francisco Umbral, as well as reaching its fifth edition. Unsparingly critical, En la orilla forms an integral part of the cultural requestioning of social values in the wake of the Spanish crisis, “la literatura de la crisis,” which stresses the human and material consequences of the suspension of human values stemming from the social endorsement of market imperialism. En la orilla thematizes the corrosion of moral character during Spains economic boom, in its multiple forms, such as selfishness, disregard for the elderly, and arrant mercenariness, while also fictionalizing neoliberal Spains exclusion of immigrants and the poor. Integral to Chiribess historically contextualized critique of the recession, and the object of my study, is a perceptive vision of the historical degeneration of masculinity from the Second Republic, 1931–1936, to the present day. This article will first provide a brief overview of “la literatura de la crisis,” while the second part illumines the economic and ideological distortion of the father–son relationship in this novel.

Annual hours, workplace partnership and mutual gains: exploring the links

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the capacity of annual hours (AH) to deliver gains to both workers and management and assesses the role of workplace partnership in three Irish companies that have adopted AH. Design/methodology/approach – Three case studies are compared and contrasted. The case studies were compiled through semi-structured interviews with management and trade union representatives, a survey of 205 workers and secondary material. Findings – The authors find that workplace partnership is not a prerequisite for achieving mutual gains where AH are concerned. The research draws attention to the importance of a mechanism for the creation of gains, in these cases, AH and that such gains can arise from different processes. Mutual gains output is not confined to workplace partnership but can arise from collective bargaining. Originality/value – The paper highlights the importance of comparing case studies so that the role of factors often seen as causal to mutual gains in exemplar...

Cosmopolitan memory and national memory conflicts: On the dynamics of their interaction

Levy and Sznaider’s positing of a global cosmopolitan memory has negated the reductionism inherent in classifying national memory cultures as homogeneous, globalized phenomena by redefining the interaction between the two as a coalescence of the two elements rather than a superimposition of the global on the national with the attendant eradication of the latter. A survey of countries that have adopted the edicts of cosmopolitan memory, however, indicates that this coalescence can take the form of either a strained dialectic or a relatively easy symbiosis. By examining primarily the interaction between cosmopolitan memory and national memory conflicts in Ireland and Austria, this article aims to ascertain the constituent elements of the national memory conflict which serve to increase or diminish the strength of the influence of global cosmopolitan memory.

Illusory Liberalism in Atlas de geografía humana

Atlas de Geografía Humana constitutes a critique of the much vaunted notion of a progressive Spain that has rectified the gender inequalities of the Francoist era, as one of the highly educated and successful protagonists, Fran, unwittingly adopts her mother’s alignment with patriarchal norms. This novel elucidates the incompatibility of the private and public sphere in Spain, for it is only with the protagonist’s renewal of her commitment to the private sphere that she will save her marriage, despite its negative consequences for her career. Fran’s ambiguous decision to have a child sustains the view that a traditional mentality governs the Spanish private sphere, and that the demands of the public and private spheres are frequently irreconcilable. In this article, I explore the current situation of women in Spain, and I then proceed to examine the motifs of the mother-daughter relationship and childfreedom in this novel.

The Enactment of Resistance: Hidden and Public Transcripts in Alfons Cervera's El ciclo de la memoria

Abstract Alfons Cerveras el ciclo de la memoria, a tetralogy, which consists of the novels El color del crepúsculo, Maquis, Aquel invierno, and La noche inmóvil, skilfully explores the intersection between private and public memories, and the means by which the defeated Republicans resisted the dominant Francoist memory narrative during the period 1939–2005. His depiction of the individual reaction to dominant decisions re-conceives memory as an intimate possession, replete with moral and ethical significance, and rejects its use as a political lever. In this tetralogy, memory is divorced from politics, which are only ever pertinent insofar as they impinge negatively on the individual, and is instead relocated in the private sphere where the individual and the family struggle to maintain a prohibited or taboo memory. Grounded in the sociology of memory, this article seeks to ascertain the means by which the Republicans resisted and rejected the dominant Francoist memory narrative and preserved their prohibited Republican memory, that is, to elucidate the dynamics of Republican memory. It is argued that Cervera critiques the idea of a collective memory and identity by re-defining them as continuums that require the harmonization of past and present.

Motherhood, Clothing and Class in Almudena Grandes’ Los aires difíciles

Abstract In Almudena Grandes’ 2002 novel, Los aires difíciles, the protagonist Sara is adopted and socialized in an upper-class household, but at the age of sixteen, is returned to her parents by her benefactress, Doña Sara, who ‘había cansado de jugar de mamás y papás’. Sara’s resentment at this abrupt severance from her former life leaves her with an intense hatred of Doña Sara, and a desire for both the recuperation of her former status and vengeance. In fashioning an adoptive mother figure, Doña Sara, as the transmitter of class norms, Grandes hypostasizes the artificiality of the mother’s role in reproducing intractable social edicts. In other words, the reproduction of class in this novel is demonstrated to be a social construct associated with maternity, not a natural outgrowth of the mother-daughter relationship. Departing from a theoretical basis of fashion studies and contemporary Spanish history, I analyse the maternal transmission of class in this novel. My analysis consists of two parts: an initial theoretical scrutiny of the relationship between class, clothing and motherhood, while the second part will examine this motif in the work in question.

The role of the state in shaping zero hours work in an atypical liberal market economy

Zero hours work typifies work where there are no guaranteed hours offered by the employer. This article examines the relationship between the state and the emergence of zero hours work in an atypical liberal market economy, Ireland. Based on interviews with informed stakeholders with a focus on four sectors – retail, health, education and accommodation/food – the article concludes that the actions of the state have created a weak regulatory environment that has facilitated the emergence of zero hours work. The findings are discussed with a theoretical frame using the concepts of accumulation and legitimation.

The Formation of Neoliberal Spanish Womanhood in Lucia Etxebarría’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes

This article frames Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes within the context of Spanish neoliberalism as revealed by class distinction, urban spatial cleavages, and neoliberal feminism. Based primarily on a dual theoretical framework of neoliberal feminism and Mimi Schippers’ dichotimization of hegemonic and pariah femininities, with tangential theoretical references to bisexuality and urban policy in Madrid, I revisit Etxebarría’s relationship to feminism and interrogate her subscription to a neoliberalist world view. This conceptual basis provides a new prism for assessing Etxebarría’s feminist credentials, while also exploring her interrelated neoliberal conformity. My analysis is tripartite, consisting of an initial scrutiny of her textual encoding of a neoliberal feminism which produces a hegemonic femininity that creates stigmatized ‘pariah femininities’. In the second part of this article, I examine her representation of class and spatial striation in the urban milieu of Madrid. The final section deconstructs Etxebarría’s narrative representation of lesbianism and bisexuality. Criticism to date has tended to pivot exclusively around the figure of Beatriz, and by according critical primacy to the novel’s secondary female characters, such as Mónica, her mother Charo, Beatriz’s mother, Herminia and Cat, I aim to uncover this much-studied novel’s unexplored inferences concerning female subjectivity, urban space, and class in contemporary Spain.