Walking through the Darkest Valley. Heritage and hatred in the era of reactionary populism

Many emotions are associated with heritage, from pride to sadness, but hatred is not the first one that comes to mind. Heritage, however, can–and often does–elicit resentment, loathing and violence. From this perspective, it can become socially dangerous (see Colwell, Chapter 7 in this volume), as it creates divisions and even promotes violence against specific groups. In this chapter, I will first discuss the relationship between heritage, negative heritage and hatred, which I will illustrate with the case of the Confederate statues in the United States. I will then describe my own personal experience visiting (and being expelled from) Europe’s last standing and fully active fascist monument: the Valley of the Fallen in Spain. The Valley was built between 1940 and 1959, using forced labour, by the Franco dictatorship as a colossal mausoleum in remembrance of those killed in the Civil War. Defenders of the complex present it not as negative heritage, but as the opposite: a monument to reconciliation. My visit to the place, and the subsequent events, proved otherwise. To understand what happened to me in the Valley, as well as what the Valley does and silences at the same time, I will resort to both autoethnography or, rather, autoarchaeology (Harrison and Schofield 2009) and internet ethnography (Garcia et al. 2009). In my reading of the situation, I use the concept of ‘institutional analyser’, developed by French psychoanalysts in the 1960s. An institutional analyser is any event, often a spontaneous one, that exposes a hidden conflict in the collective unconscious of an institution or organization.

Negative heritage. Franco dictatorship. Spanish Civil War. Social memory. Cultural emotions.