Agency, responsibility and silence in the construction of contemporary history in Chile and Spain

Abstract

This article focuses on how the dictatorships and subsequent transitions to democracy are portrayed in recent history textbooks used in secondary schools in Chile and Spain. These periods are considered crucial because they have dramatically impacted the social and political landscape and have shaped the course of historical events at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The textbooks adapted are particularly revealing since they reflect the official version of history that is being passed on to a new generation. We have chosen four textbooks as our corpus, two from Chile and two from Spain. As our analytical framework we use analyses of Transitivity and Appraisal (systemic functional linguistics) to determine how participants and processes are represented and evaluated in the texts. The way authors silence some social actors while giving prominence to others is a strategy for constructing causality and historical explanations in textbooks.