The ‘transnational turn’, which is challenging bounded views on national belonging, also opens up promising perspectives for memory studies. It fosters a rethinking and reconfiguring of national memories in the context of transnational connectedness. My sketch of seven types of transnational memories points to different empirical contexts in which states, politicians, jurists, activists, artists and scholars go beyond national borders and interests to conceptualise new forms of belonging, solidarity and cultural identification in a world characterised by streams of migration and the lingering impact of traumatic and entangled pasts.

This article traces the evolution in the discourses and representations of victimhood, citing a range of examples from across Europe. Beginning with a macro approach to the question of memory groups, which examines the representation of the victim via collective memory, the article then goes on to discuss how these groups, which are related to historical violence, have presented themselves in the public realm from the 1950s to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which different memories work together within systems of representation, the function of analogy, metaphor and allegory as rhetorical devices and how one memory often serves as a ‘screen’ or a prism via which to approach another.

Even though none of the recent reference works on Holocaust literature mentions the Mexican output on this topic, there exists a substantial tradition of literary works in Mexico that address the Holocaust. This essay offers a survey of this tradition, with a focus on how the authors of these works relate the Holocaust to the Mexican context from which they are writing. I argue that most of the Mexican authors I study treat the Holocaust as part of a shared history, rather than a history towards which they adopt an outsider’s perspective.

This article confronts two films about the request for a European passport by a Latin American citizen: Um Passaporte Húngaro (A Hungarian Passport, 2001) and El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace, 2003). Both films deal with memory of the Jewish-Latin American migration that took place within the context of the Holocaust, and both gear this problematic towards other, more contemporary, stories of displacement. It is argued that this multidirectional quality operates in two ways in relation to the concept of nationality: whereas one film puts it to work in order to critique and deconstruct the nation (centrifugal logic), the other uses it to opposite effect: to reaffirm and rebuild it (centripetal logic).

This paper analyses testimonies of survivors of the detention camps operated by the last military dictatorship in Argentina, with special attention to the functions served by the referencing of testimonies of the Shoah (above all in Ese infierno, a collective testimony by five women in dialogue form). The intertextuality herein assumes different functions in the shaping of discourses and representations, whether in the form of a quotation, an epigraph, a metaphor, an endeavour to legitimise what is being said, a comparison, or an effort to incorporate one’s own experience into a narrative of the catastrophe already so well known in human history.

Theses about globalised, cosmopolitan, transnational or multilateral memories have received wide circulation over the past few decades. However, their reception in – and pertinence to – Latin America has up to now received little attention within the international debate. This article aims to contribute to this debate by focusing on the particular field of memorialisation discourses and practices. The text posits the existence of a certain global memorialising language, characterised by particular aesthetic and architectonic features. These traits are placed in contrast and in dialogue with the rich memorial tradition that has developed in Argentina since the 1970s, led by the human rights movement and its supporters.

This article examines the figure of the desaparecido as a transnational symbol, focusing on the ‘success’ this figure has had in the contemporary debate about memory in Spain. Taken from the repressive context of the dictatorships of the 1970s in South America, the disappeared have travelled to the Spain of the twenty-first century, where they are progressively replacing the former ‘fusilados y paseados’ of the Franco Regime. After charting the ways in which the term has been used in the public debate, we analyse the figure of the disappeared in the novel, El vano ayer, by the Spanish writer Isaac Rosa.

This article analyses the role of transnational memory in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel Sepharad (2001). Because of the way this novel incorporates the memory of European totalitarianism and the Holocaust, it has been considered an example of multidirectional memory. Making use of Rothberg’s ‘map’ of the discursive field of public memory, this analysis shows that the transnationalisation of memory in Sepharad is conditioned, and to a certain extent restrained, by two factors: in the first place, the strong relation with the Spanish context of enunciation and the local debates on memory; and second, the tension between a transnational, ‘multidirectional’ perspective on memory and the desire to narrate universal experiences of victimisation.

This article looks at the question of transnational memory in the work of contemporary Spanish playwrights, Juan Mayorga and Antonio Álamo. It analyses and interprets the theatrical devices employed by each playwright respectively and the construction of a poetics of memory. It then goes on to consider the multidirectional potential of the intertextual references to other authors, histories and events – most notably the Holocaust – in plays of Mayorga and Álamo. It is via these intertextual engagements that the plays confront the limits, or (im)possibility of representation and it argues that the authors dive into a vast network of European memory, which in turn serves as a ‘screen’ for the memory of Spanish people, as it throws light on the Civil War and Francoist Spain. Thus, experiences such as Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the Warsaw ghetto become icons of a transnational memory that places the reader/spectator in the position of co-participant in an introspective exploration designed to unsettle.

Translated by Chase Raymond

Based on the work of theoreticians prevalent in the field of Memory Studies (Rothberg, Nora, Radstone, Aguilar, Faber, de Diego, Gómez López-Quiñones and Labanyi), this article analyses the films The Devil Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth by the Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro as examples of a memory-formation that is deeply entrenched within Spain’s current political, legal and cultural debates on the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist dictatorship and the political immunity institutionalised by the Transition’s pact of silence. At the same time, as emerging from ‘otherlands’ of memory, Del Toro’s films are good examples of how multidirectional memories react to universal/transnational concerns about traumatic pasts and violations of human rights.

This article examines Michael Ondaatje’s 2001 novel Anil’s Ghost, placing it within the context of a history of disappearance as a form of state terrorism on a global level. It contests the controversial response that Ondaatje’s work received, which alleged lack of political engagement in the novel on account of what critics saw as its ‘Westernised approach’. Instead, what is argued here is that Anil’s Ghost presents a particular form of ‘working through’, first by approaching disappearances through the embedded lives and subjectivities of targeted populations, and second by using the specific historical and local setting in Sri Lanka to explore the politics of disappearances as a global phenomenon.

This special issue demonstrates the strengths of a located approach to transnational memory. The issue focuses intensively on Argentina and Spain, but also makes forays into Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, among other locations. By ‘located’ I do not mean simply ‘local’ – indeed, negotiating the question of the local and its relation to the global is high on the agenda of this special issue. A located approach to transnational memory might take inspiration from the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich’s concept of a ‘politics of location’.1 A politics of location does indeed pay rigorous attention to the local – starting from the intimate terrain of the body – but it situates such attention in relation to other scales: from the regional to the national to the global. While Rich’s essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ does not address the question of memory directly, her famous assertion that ‘a place on the map is also a place in history’ resonates with the stakes of the essays collected here – essays that deal, as does Rich’s ‘Notes’, with the contradictory and intersecting legacies of state-sponsored violence (Ref. 1, p. 212).