A nation of ghosts? : haunting, historical memory and forgetting in post-franco Spain

This essay examines some of the critical and theoretical approaches in the area of historical memory and identity studies that have emerged as a response to the contemporary cultural challenges that have resulted from the social and political transformations which have taken place globally in the last decades. The essay narrows its focus to a case study of the role of historical memory in the formation of collective identities in contemporary Spain, in the aftermath of the dictatorship and the subsequent political transition. This study explores in particular the use of the trope of haunting ghosts in contemporary Spanish literature and cinema as symtomatic form of spectrality of the repressed collective past.