The Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University

Sara Santamaría Colmenero is a postdoctoral researcher from the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University (Denmark). She has been involved in different projects on how contemporary Spanish society deals with controversial and violent pasts. She studies the public uses of the colonial past and the ways in which memories of violent pasts are constructed and transmitted within Spanish and colonized societies. Her current project analyses the cultural memories of Spanish imperial past in West Africa (specifically in Equatorial Guinea) compared to the memories of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. This project combines the fields of memory studies and postcolonial theory in order to examine how narratives about colonial pasts reproduce racial regimes of representation and neocolonial discourses. The project is co-founded by the Danish Council for Independent Research and the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development