Alfredo J. Sosa-Velasco
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846318337
- eISBN:
- 9781846317880
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846318337.003.0011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This essay discusses how Riera's Dins el darrer blau (1994) revisits the past in order to create a “culture of memory,” a process whereby society confronts its traumatic past and the history of exile ...
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This essay discusses how Riera's Dins el darrer blau (1994) revisits the past in order to create a “culture of memory,” a process whereby society confronts its traumatic past and the history of exile and repression. Riera's novel is based on historical events that occurred in the City of Mallorca from 1687 to 1691. I suggest that this work engages with ideas of collective memory relating to the Jewish historical experience. Much of Dins el darrer blau corresponds to the writing on diaspora, implicitly questioning the relation between collective memory and nation. Riera shows what happens when the process of memory transcends ethnic national boundaries—what Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2002) have referred to as “cosmopolitan memory”. From this perspective, the persecution of Jewish converts in Mallorca can be remembered beyond the personal or even the group identities of the Jewish victims and the Catholic perpetrators on the island.Less
This essay discusses how Riera's Dins el darrer blau (1994) revisits the past in order to create a “culture of memory,” a process whereby society confronts its traumatic past and the history of exile and repression. Riera's novel is based on historical events that occurred in the City of Mallorca from 1687 to 1691. I suggest that this work engages with ideas of collective memory relating to the Jewish historical experience. Much of Dins el darrer blau corresponds to the writing on diaspora, implicitly questioning the relation between collective memory and nation. Riera shows what happens when the process of memory transcends ethnic national boundaries—what Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2002) have referred to as “cosmopolitan memory”. From this perspective, the persecution of Jewish converts in Mallorca can be remembered beyond the personal or even the group identities of the Jewish victims and the Catholic perpetrators on the island.
