Translation Rights TQE / History and celebration

A critical analysis about the image that society has elaborated about itself.

This rigorous work tackles, with a tinge of irreverence, a trait of contemporary society that perhaps historians have not reflected upon sufficiently: the overabundance of historical celebrations, collective commemorations and patriotic anniversaries of all types with the consequent exercise of cohesion around a specific notion of ethnicity, nation, people or collective myth.

All celebrations aspire to mobilize a specific memory, granting great importance to certain events and forgetting others. As the author points out, the anniversaries of the independence of countries, universal exhibitions, or forums – such as the one that took place over a period of several months in Barcelona in 2004 – are an excellent opportunity to explore the ethical and political aspects of the history of the present, to illuminate the clichés upon which there is a wish to consolidate power and, above all, to critically analyze the image – or perhaps the illusion – that a society elaborates about itself.

“A hilarious and splendid meditation about the forms, phobias, knowledge, routines, common places and deficiencies with which – still today – we approach our country’s history, a body made up of preconceptions, vagueness, false truths and half truths repeated ad absurdum.” Letras Libres

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo (La Piedad, Michoacán, Mexico, 1962) has a PhD in History from Stanford University and currently works as a History professor in Chicago University and as an associate professor in the Center for Economic Investigation and Teaching in Mexico. He is the author of many articles and reviews and of the books América Latina y cultura (Latin America and Culture, 1999), De cómo ignorar (About Ignoring, 2000), El urbanista (The Town Planner, 2004) and, in collaboration with Aurora Gómez, El Porfiriato: una propuesta y un balance (The Porfirio Years: A Proposal and a Balance, 2006). In the years 2000-2001 he formed part of Berlin’s Wissenschaftkolleg and in 2006, he held the Rosario Castellanos chair in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.