Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939-1945

This book tells the story of tens of thousands of Spanish Civil War refugees who were held in internment camps in France during the period immediately following the end of the war in Spain, and throughout the initial stages of the Second World War. These refugee camps spawned a rich legacy of cultural works that dramatically demonstrate how a displaced political community began to reconstitute itself from the ruins of war. Combining close textual analyses of former inmates’ diaries, poetry, drama, and fiction with a carefully researched historical perspective, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire investigates how the earliest literature of the period of civil war exile appropriated the internment camp as a discursive vehicle. Cate-Arries explores the process of cultural reconstruction that begins behind the barbed-wire perimeter of the camps themselves. The internee-authors ultimately encode these physical spaces as a place of subversion, resistance, and political agency. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of exile studies, Spanish Civil War history and the diaspora of 1939.