This panel gathers together scholars working in a variety of disciplinary traditions and sites whose research converges on the question of how emergent forms of the political draw on and refigure the Spanish past to imagine and make demands on the future. Our analytics depend on taking history, memory, and temporality as objects of inquiry, rather than as givens; we likewise approach “Spain” and “Europe” as contested projects whose conceptualization and enactment require immense labor. Thus, we ask what counts as resurrection, revival, or return in a particular field of relations and what this might tell us about distinctions made between past, present, and future, between subjects and objects, or between the living and the dead.

Based on research in settings as diverse as unmarked graves, legal bureaucracies, magazine archives, synagogues, World Heritage Centers, and photographs, we address questions such as: How is the present imagined as problematic in contemporary Spain and how does the past become a solution for the future? What are the moral and political economies shaping social movements and knowledge production? What obstacles, limits, or, opportunities do history or memory pose in the present? How are authority, sovereignty, and liberalism being articulated or challenged in Spain, and how does this inform our understanding of political, financial, and epistemological crisis?