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Language
English (en)
Date of Award
3-29-2013
Author's Department
International and Area Studies
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)
Restricted/Unrestricted
Restricted
Abstract
In the wake of dictatorship, cultural revival and cultural memory gain poignant political significance, "What should be remembered?" becomes a question of human rights, and, "What should be commemorated?" a question of justice. In this thesis, I look at the xuwefe narrative in Palma, Mallorca, in which the politics of commemoration have surged to the political stage in the wake of a number of political and economic changes over the course of the last half-century. In the years following Francisco Franco's death in 1975, Spain transitioned to democracy, and the politics of religious and linguistic identity moved to the front of the collective political imagination. A group of historically segregated Mallorcans-whose ancestors were dubbed, xuere, derived from the mallorquin word for 'pig,' and similar to the peninsular term marrano----moved to the political stage as government archives were opened to the academic public. In 1986, the Israeli government and the Spanish government worked to establish an Institute for Balearic-Israeli Relations. Architects began to draft memorials to commemorate violence against the xuetes. A small Jewish community almost entirely consisting of 're-converted' xue/es formed and began to flourish. Yet no memorial was ever built-largely at the behest of xuefe descendants. The central research questions I would like to address by examining this case study are: how does the built fabric of a city reflect the collective memory of its occupants? Can the built environment reveal the ways in which a community copes with, represents and codifies histories of systemic violence?
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/zxrw-m713
Mentor
Tabea Linhard
Recommended Citation
Roth, Sarah, "The Fabrics of Memory: Sites of Violence, Collective Memory and the Jewish Narrative in Palma, Mallorca" (2013). Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses. 165.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/zxrw-m713