Remembering European pasts between cosmopolitan and multidirectional memories
The research project aims at delving further into the conflicts and entanglements between heterogeneous collective forms of remembering the 20th-century’s past in Europe. More specifically, its main goal is to shed light on to what extent the notions of “multidirectional memory” and “cosmopolitan memory” grasp the potentialities of a common European memory to work as a framework for unifying commemorations and narratives. Echoing current debates on conflicts within Western European and Eastern European memories such exploration is based upon a comparative analysis among different “sites of memory and mourning” (Winter 2014), each of them belonging to a different narrative. The research project thus follows a research line of analysis memory studies from a European and transnational perspective. Drawing from my previous research on the Spanish Civil War memory, the transnational articulations of memory within local contexts has provided priceless resources from which to restore victims’ rights. These entanglements between the national and the European encouraged exploring to what extent the European Union can provide, as Aline Sierp´s (2016) describes it, a public sphere in which all such heterogeneous voices could always find an audience. After all, the underpinning of European common memory needs to cope with the conflicts and heterogeneous narratives that are at its core.
Biographical Note
Rafael Pérez Baquero is an Assistant Professor at the University of Murcia (Spain). He is holding a Phd in Philosophy from the University of Murcia (Spain), with a Fellowship by Spanish Ministry of Education. His doctoral dissertation was entitled Narrating History, Remembering Trauma: Memory and Forgetfulness of Spanish Civil War, eighty years later. Philosophy Graduate by University of Murcia (2009-2013), MA in Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, and University Expert in Social Memory and Human Rights (2018), by UNED (2013-2014). Visiting Researcher at Romance Studies Department, Cornell University (2017) and at Languages and Cultures Department, Birkbeck, University of London (2018) and at Tartu University (2020). His investigation attempts to delve into the definition of the dynamics and influences that arise between collective memory and the writing of history; in order to apply this theoretical background to the Spanish case. Specifically, he intends to explore the evolution of the memory of the Civil War (1936-39) during the democratic transition and thereafter.
His most important publications include:
R. P. Baquero. “Melancholia in Contemporary Spain: Digging Up a Past that did not pass away”, in Boryslawski, Rafal; Bemben Alicja (eds.), Emotions: Engines of History, Routledge: London, 2021, pp. 223-238.
R. P. Baquero. “Witnessing Catastrophe: Testimony and Historical Representation within and beyond the Holocaust”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XXI, 2021, pp. 231-250.
R. P. Baquero. “From Psychoanalysis to Cultural Trauma: Narrating Legacies of Collective Suffering”. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory. 6, 2021, pp. 1-16.
R.P. Baquero. Trauma, recuerdo y duelo: Una aproximación filosófica a las relaciones entre memoria e historia, Editorial Comares: Granada, 2021.