Stanford University Press Blog

What Remains of Francisco Franco

When the personal becomes necropolitical.

HANS RUIN

Photograph of Valle de los Caídos. "62016-Valley-of-the-Fallen" by xiquinhosilva. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY 2.0

 

We're pleased to present this adapted excerpt from Chapter 4 of Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness» by Hans Ruin.

In recent years the political fabric of Spain has been torn apart by a struggle over the location of a heap of human bones: the remains of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The current left-wing government had promised that it would move Franco’s remains from the spectacular tomb-church dug hundred meters into a cliff in the mountains north of Madrid in the Valle de los Caídos,  the “Valley of the Fallen.” Franco himself arranged this monument as an attempt to unite the nation after a brutal civil war. The bodies of over 30,000 soldiers and civilians from across the political spectrum, including workers on the site, were interred in the same tomb, at the center of which he chose to rest himself. Until very recently he laid there alongside his main ideologues, under an enormous cross coming out of the mountain. But his remains were moved under guard in October of last year. In an attempt to restore him post-mortem to civilian status, his coffin was taken to the family crypt in a cemetery near Madrid. The Franco family was fiercely opposed to this move, as were large parts of Spanish society. However, to the majority in a country where many families still carry painful memories from the war, the persistence of this fascist monument was simply intolerable, a “moral insult,” in the words of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The commemorated dead need not be political or military heroes in order to have a necropolitical significance.

Spain is a country where such necropolitical struggles continue to dominate public life. The question of how to care for the dead, where to place the dead and how to commemorate them in death, is an issue that simply will not go away. If earlier generations of sociologists believed that this kind of culture of death and mourning belonged to an earlier stage of human political life and civilization, we are continuously reminded of how it persists. The dead will not leave the public space. In my book Being with the Dead» I deploy a broad range of philosophical tools from phenomenology, deconstruction, and cultural memory studies to describe and understand the inner workings of what I there describe as a fundamental trait of human social existence: we live not only with the living but also with the dead.

On the surface this is perhaps obvious, when we look at all the ways that we continue to engage with the dead, to remember them, to worship but also to struggle with them and their legacies. What they have left behind, in the form of books, artworks, cultural artifacts, and constitutions, continue to guide how we live and understand reality and ourselves. The dead are always with us, from the most intimate family archives to the monuments for our nations’ founders and cultural heroes. Being with the dead is ultimately what makes it possible for us to occupy historical time. If it was not for our relation to the dead, history would lose much of its meaning: The past is really a domain of those who have been.

Distance and Depth

Understanding the intersect of literary text and computers.

MARTIN PAUL EVE

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

One of the ways in which literary studies recurrently defends itself is through the idea of critical attention. English literature, as a field, is sold as allowing students to move from eddies of formalist close textual attention to the tidal fluxes of large-scale literary history, all while developing their thinking within politico-theoretical streams that extend the possibility of progressive real-world change. These oscillations between theory, archive, and formalism sometimes form the bases for scholarly contention: ‘what is the proper object of literary studies?’ For students of the discipline, though, such variety often coheres into a dynamic and stimulating field that does, indeed, teach critical thinking skills and can foster a life-long love of reading.

‘To err is human’, the oft-misattributed quotation runs, ‘but to really foul things up you need a computer’. And ‘computational literary studies’ or ‘digital literary studies’ has attracted some flack for fouling things up, to put it mildly. Conventionally, approaches in this space towards literary texts have been critiqued as ‘bad’ stylistics/formalism; as a-theoretical/anti-progressive; or as historical mis-readings. The apparently scientistic incursion of computational approaches evokes a fear for the historical, textual, and political sensitivities on which literary studies has staked its claims of critical thought. The fact that digital humanities seems, to many, to attract funding only serves to confirm its misplacement in literary studies departments.

Many arguments for digital approaches to the study of literature, though, rest on the problems of canon and selection (which, of course, are overtly political). More works of fiction are published every year than it is possible to read in a lifetime. Our judgements on the worth of fiction, both new and old, are conditioned by a set of market practices that limit our understanding of true mutations in writing over time. In this light, recent books by Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and others have built on the traditions of so-called distant reading but also predictive modelling in order better to understand the larger scale sweeps of literary history, without resorting to periodizing description. Charting continuous change rather than distinct epistemic and aesthetic breaks, such methods examine computationally the effect that linguistic mutations have upon our understandings of literary history.

Using software as a tool to explore texts can lead us to new literary insight, if we retain a vibrant critical, theoretical, historical, and interpretative imagination.

There is a second strand of digital work in literary studies, though, that underpins such an approach to ‘distance’: text analysis. Often operating at smaller scales, for distance should not be opposed depth, such work seeks to extract linguistic features from individual texts or authors and then to visualize or otherwise present the results. This can be of use as the repetitious nature of examining, say, foregroundedness (in which a textual feature stands out with prominence) as opposed to its actual quantitative presence (how often it really occurs) is beyond the patience of most readers. Yet distant approaches at scale rely on this microscopic approach working, the idea being that if we can accurately measure and computationally discern features at the atomic level we can then scale this up to work on unknown texts and corpora.

What William Barr Can Learn from Ramsey Clark

Lonnie Brown on William Barr, Ramsey Clark, and the necessity of independence

LONNIE T. BROWN, JR.

February 2019- William P. Barr being sworn in as Attorney General by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts with the participation of President Donald J. Trump. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

During his confirmation hearing, William Barr touted his ability to distance himself from politics and to safeguard the rule of law, declaring, under oath, that as attorney general he would be “truly independent." To many, Barr’s words provided comfort or at least hope that he would be guided by law and principle, not the president’s political agenda. However, since being confirmed, his actions have revealed the illusory nature of his sworn declaration.

Rather than exhibiting the fairmindedness and objectivity expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr seems to have established a de facto attorney-client relationship with President Trump, serving as his strident advocate and partisan defender. For example, in March, he zealously made the president’s case for “no collusion” by publicly recasting the substance and tenor of Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

More recently, in a similar vein, the attorney general sharply criticized the findings of the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian involvement in the president’s 2016 campaign. That report concluded that the FBI had adequate grounds to open the investigation and was not politically motivated. In a rather transparent effort to parrot President Trump’s “witch-hunt” narrative, Barr characterized the FBI’s investigation as having been based on the “thinnest of suspicions” that he personally believed to be “insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

My guess is that a large segment of the electorate, across the political spectrum, sees nothing wrong with or surprising about Attorney General Barr’s alignment with the president, or any attorney general’s close relationship with a president, for that matter. Such a rapport is by no means simply a Republican phenomenon. President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder, for instance, once referred to himself as the president’s “wingman,” connoting that his job was to have the chief executive’s back.

Suggested Reading for Martin Luther King Jr. Day

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we have composed a recommended reading list focused around civil rights, history, and justice.

 

 

 

Black Quotidian »
Everyday History in African-American Newspapers

By Matthew F. Delmont

A Stanford Digital Project

 

 

Winner of the 2019 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities, sponsored by the American Studies Association (ASA) - Digital Humanities Caucus.

 

Black Quotidian explores everyday lives of African Americans in the twentieth century. Drawing on an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, Matthew F. Delmont guides readers through a wealth of primary resources that reveal how the Black press popularized African-American history and valued the lives of both famous and ordinary Black people. Claiming the right of Black people to experience and enjoy the mundane aspects of daily life has taken on a renewed resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter, an era marked by quotidian violence, fear, and mourning.

As a work of digital history, Black Quotidian models an innovative approach to research exploration and scholarly communication. As a teaching resource, it fosters self-driven exploration of primary resources within and beyond the curriculum.

The Romantics and the Information Age

The fortunes of literature and how the culture of data is older than we think.

YOHEI IGARASHI

Inkwells and other writing implements from the 18th and 19th century. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with The Connected Condition» author Yohei Igarashi

 

What’s this book about?  

My hope in writing The Connected Condition was to have readers think about British Romantic poetry a little bit differently and in a way that’s suggestive about contemporary concerns. Romantic literature’s distinguishing literary features and motifs, and its very emergence as an artistic movement, have been accounted for in a variety of ways for a very long time: for example, as  responses to eighteenth-century poetic style, the French Revolution, or industrialization. I wanted to suggest that the period could be understood in an additional way, as registering the beginnings of the information age, our information age. The Romantics found themselves living with, quite ambivalently, an early version of today’s world of communication, media, and information technologies. My chapter on John Keats, for example, considers how his poetry harbors a tension between broader cultural desires about speedy communication sparked by early telegraphy and the slow reading traditionally associated with ornate, figurative poetic language of the sort that defined Keats’s own literary style.

The opening pages of The Connected Condition reflect on how I’m a slow reader and writer, and the book as a whole considers the ways that the Romantics capitulated to the norms of informational efficiency and speed as much as they criticized them through their writings