The Ghosts of the Nation: Ephemeral Activism and the Politics of Commemorations in Postcolonial Spain

Abstract

This article examines how decolonial interventions can disrupt the temporal and epistemic regimes that produce and legitimise colonial heritage. Drawing on critical heritage studies, decolonial theory, and memory studies, it argues that current conflicts over monuments are not merely disputes about historical representation but struggles over temporal sovereignty. The argument is developed through two interconnected case studies in Madrid (Spain). First, it analyses the city’s imperial memory complex focusing on the Monumento a la Hispanidad (Monument to Hispanicity) and the wider symbolic landscape surrounding the Museo de América (Americas Museum), where colonial and Francoist narratives continue to reinforce one another within the democratic urban fabric. Second, it examines the anonymous intervention carried out on 1 January 2023, when activists impaled a replica of Francisco Franco’s head on the bayonet of the recently inaugurated Estatua del Legionario (Legionnaire Statue). Rather than demanding the monument’s destruction, the intervention temporarily suspended its commemorative authority, exposing the colonial genealogies and fascist continuities embedded in Spain’s official public heritage.
The analysis adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary, and comparative approach. It proposes that such political interventions should be understood as practices of temporal disruption that create fragile yet significant openings within hegemonic memory regimes. Although they cannot produce structural transformation on their own, these interventions expand the horizon of political imagination by reconnecting counter-memories of struggle and resistance that have been rendered invisible, forgotten, or disconnected. Their democratic potential lies in their capacity to broaden the field of resonances through which the past can be narrated, contested, and denaturalised. The article concludes that decolonising heritage requires moving beyond debates over preservation, removal, or resignification towards a critical engagement with the material, epistemic, and temporal structures through which colonial power continues to shape the present and, with it, the future.