29 oktober 2020: Hostages of Memory. Construction of the Self in Memoirs of the Spanish Refugee Children in the USSR

Under spanska inbördeskriget evakuerades tusentals barn på den republikanska sidan till Sovjetunionen. 29 oktober 2020 berättar forskaren Natalia Kharitonova om barnen och deras minnen. 

• Plats: Föreläsningen hålls via Zoom, en länk kommer att publiceras längre fram.
• Tid: 15.15 till 16.45
• Språk: Engelska med möjlighet att ställa frågor på spanska.
• Ordförande: David Watson, docent, engelska institutionen och forskningsledare för nätverket Lilae.

Abstract

From 1937 to 1939 during the Spanish civil war and after the Republicans defeat, almost 3,000 children were evacuated from Spain to the Soviet Union. The process of return took several decades. It coincided with the “Spanish children’s” need to explain their life stories, write and advertise their memories. How do the official commemorative culture and social master narratives condition their writing? How do they write about themselves? I wish to discuss strategies that authors use constructing their personal identities and to reveal the specific politics of memory that drive these records.

Natalia Kharitova

Natalia Kharitonova earned her PhD in Hispanic Literature from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of World Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). She taught previously at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Her areas of expertise are Spanish Republican exile literature; Spanish-Russian literary and cultural relations; transatlantic studies. She published a number of works on Spanish Republican exile, among them the monograph Edificar la cultura, construir la identidad: El exilio republicano español de 1939 en la Unión Soviética (Seville, 2014). Her paper on Spanish Children’s memoirs was produced during her scholarship period at Uppsala University, which was funded by the Swedish Institute.

Gästföreläsningen anordnas av Seminariet för romansk litteraturvetenskap i samarbete med nätverket Lilae.