Managing the undead : mediating a usable past through representations of maternal and infant endangerment and mortality

This project explores the use of images of maternal and infant death and endangerment within Spanish visual culture, as part of the mediation of historical memory of the Civil War and Francoism, in order to create, articulate and disseminate ‘usable pasts’. Universally tragic, child death has been represented for centuries in relation to conflicts, injustices, displacements, natural tragedies, and bereavement rituals. Infant death and suffering is also, clearly, inseparable from maternity and motherhood, and indeed threats to both. As such, this project explores the continuum of representation of which these images are part, interrogating the use and manipulation of images of maternity, child endangerment, and infant death in terms of their role in the narration of ‘usable pasts’. In contrast to the global scope of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), this project seeks to examine the arguable cultural specificity and centrality of the image of the dead Spanish child, and how this figure has functioned in the creation of ‘usable pasts’ – the cultural mediation of memories and history to create functioning narratives for a collective, developed by James Wertsch (2002).In light of the niños robados scandal there has been a public re-concienciación of the visual discourse of child mortality, as the maternal body and the child’s corpse have become catalysts for new discussions of Francoist Spain in the media. Rather than presenting a survey of images of dead Spanish children, this project closely examines and compares specific cases to demonstrate distinct and evolving ways in which images of infant mortality have been manipulated in the creation and dissemination of ‘usable pasts’ as described by Wertsch.The continued influence and relevance of iconic artists’ works in discourses of conflict, suffering and representation warrants their inclusion in this study. Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810-1816), selected wartime propaganda posters (1936-1939), El espíritu de la colmena (Erice 1973), Cría cuervos (Saura 1975), El espinazo del diablo (del Toro 2001), El orfanato (Bayona 2007), and the television series Sin identidad (Noguera et al. 2014-15) exist as artefacts of cultural mediation; their function altering with time and sociopolitical context. This study draws on theorists in these areas to establish how usable pasts were created through the use or misuse of the images of children.The analyses of Goya’s work and propaganda posters of the Civil War, draw on Jay Winter’s (2009) notion of ‘wartime imaginings’ in relation to their creation of ‘useful’ versions of conflicts. Goya’s work marks an incredible advancement of such representation, one later manipulated in propagandistic narratives. The reading of familial narratives utilised within wartime propaganda posters is underpinned by Marianne Hirsch’s (1997) work on socio-historically specific discourses in family photographs. The selected cinematic and television productions represent usable pasts from the perspective of remembering, re-presenting or re-viewing the past. Their analysis is contextualised by wider discourses of recuperation, memorialisation and justice in postwar Spain. The use of the dead child as a tool of mediation in contemporary Spain unites these pieces in their continued negotiation of narrativising traumatic pasts. Central to the use of the dead child is its universality, malleability and transtemporal relevance in conflict narratives. As this following works demonstrate, such manipulation of the figure of the dead child, and the place of maternity, in wartime visual discourses, are specific to the memory challenges and needs of each time period. Although the impact of the subject is equally significant in each instance, the usability of the memories it narrates alters due to the collective’s needs or desires