Andrea Hajek

Teaching the history of terrorism in Italy: The political strategies of memory obstruction

Although more than 30 years have past, Italy continues to struggle with the difficult memory of the 1970s, a decade marked by an extreme intensification of political violence. The incapacity and unwillingness of Italian society to come to terms with this traumatic past contributes to the maintenance of a range of conflicting memories, which is particularly immanent in history education, one of the primary sources in processes of memory construction. In this essay I analyse a number of Italian school textbooks published over the past 30 years, using the concept of cultural forgetting in an attempt to unfold the political strategies of memory construction, or rather, ‘obstruction’ in history education. I find that Italian school textbooks use facts in very selective ways, often creating distorted images of the past which contribute to the difficult memory of the 1970s in Italy. In discussing the findings, I consider the role of memory communities in the creation of ‘counter‐memories’ as opposed to the dominant, ‘official’ memories that tend to omit, sideline or simply ignore facts that might contribute to a better understanding of the origins and consequences of political violence in Italy in the 1970s.

‘Mmmmm quanti, ma quanti ricordi mi evocano queste foto …’: Facebook and the 1977 family album : the digital (r)evolution of a protest generation

Abstract Memories are increasingly shaped and shared through the media, in particular visual media such as photography. However, it is not just the images that allow for memories to enter our individual and collective identities: the latter take shape in the mediation of the past through images. In other words, the very act of selecting, storing, and sharing visual data has an impact on the way the past is recalled and identities are reconstructed in the present. What happens, though, when photo albums go digital, and private snapshots become available to all? This article analyses the collective sharing of a series of photo albums of the 1977 student movement in Bologna, on the social networking site Facebook, in 2011. It explores how the collective (hi)story of the 1977 generation is reproduced online, why this specific medium was so successful in reconnecting these people thirty-five years later, and what the impact is of digital media and social networks on the reconstruction of collective identities in the present.

Tragedia all'italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970–2010

approach can provide new insights into well-worn questions about the avant-garde and the cultural role of art. Viewed in the context of Deleuze’s concept of the machinic assemblage, the Futurist use of technology manifests a clear connection with vitalist themes that were undergoing a process of modification in the early twentieth century. Throughout this investigation, Luisetti develops a richly descriptive vocabulary that effectively contrasts an intuitionist philosophy with the dominant philosophies of knowledge. While Una Vita is far from claiming to be a political manifesto, its focus on the infra-representational dynamics of generative multiplicity importantly modifies the political uses of Deleuze in the work of thinkers like Antonio Negri. The signal shift here is the move away from a political discourse beholden to the lingering conception of subjective intentionality, and towards an affirmative vitalist opening onto new artistic, philosophical and political assemblages. Drawing these diverse problematics into a single discussion, the conclusion of Una Vita turns to another ‘minor’ philosopher, Gilbert Simondon, to explicate the posthumanist implications of Luisetti’s project. In Simondon’s concept of the zoon teknikon, Luisetti recognizes an unhypostatized vitalist core that traces a subterranean path from Bergson to Deleuze via the technological avant-gardism of the Italian Futurists. In Una Vita, the interdisciplinarity that Esposito identified as the hallmark of Italian scholarship becomes a focus on the interstitial moments that interrupt the smooth flow of dominant cultural modes of representation. With this shift, considerations of temporal succession and conceptual subordination are displaced onto a topology of shifting intensities that, as Una Vita demonstrates, can successfully enter into a productive dialogue with avant-gardist aesthetics.

Introduction: Remembering and Reviving in States of Flux

‘We will remember’ is the exclamatory pledge given by those who are moving on from troubled times. It is intoned, for example, in Laurence Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance, which honours the British war dead of World War I. In its Hebrew version it gives the name to Nizkor, a web- based project that counters Holocaust denial. It is casted in plaques and chiselled into memorials meant to last forever. Moreover, the solemn promise never to forget collective experiences of trauma and pain in times to come dictates many other forms and rituals of commemoration. There, the words are uttered in order to bring together the past, the present and the future, and thus to repeatedly connect the bygone time that is to be recalled, the current time in which the pledge is given and the forthcoming time when the promise will avowedly be kept. The call and the assertion to remember are, therefore, not only backwards-looking undertakings: rather, they carry the agents, objects and circumstances of remembering along the temporal continuum between yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna

In Italy, women have long been stereotypically marked as either objects of sexual desire or as producers of new life. This changed radically in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism redefined gender relations and experimented with new paths of life not determined by matrimony and maternity. The legalisation of abortion, during the second half of the decade, is now hailed as one of the primary achievements of the womens movement. A theme closely connected to abortion such as motherhood, on the other hand, seems to have been excluded from the public memory of 1970s feminism. Drawing on the outcomes of an oral history project, this article unearths the dominant discourses and individual and collective silences within the public memory of the 1970s womens movement in the Italian city of Bologna, and explores the processes of creating ‘composure’ among women as they remember their experiences of motherhood and abortion.

COMING TO TERMS WITH TERRORISM. SERGIO CORBUCCI’S DONNE ARMATE AND THE TRAUMA OF THE ANNI DI PIOMBO

Abstract Since Italy’s transition to the Second Republic in the early 1990s, a period marked by attempts to come to terms with the traumatic experience of the violent 1970s, cinema and television have increasingly been (ab)used for the rewriting of national history, often within a revisionist framework, and for the promotion of new discourses of reconciliation. The miniseries Donne armate (Sergio Corbucci, 1991) is one such attempt to work through the trauma of political violence by rehumanizing — in the words of Giancarlo Lombardi (2009) — the demonized figure of the terrorist. Produced in the same period as Sergio Zavoli’s television documentary La notte della repubblica, where former terrorists from both sides of the ideological spectrum are offered the chance to publicly express their personal reflections and regrets, Donne armate also promotes a discourse of reconciliation by bringing together two women belonging to different sides of the law: a terrorist and a policewoman. This reconciliation with Italy’s violent past is reinforced by the casting of Lina Sastri in the role of the terrorist, calling back memories of Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Segreti segreti (1984), where Sastri interpreted a ruthless terrorist killer who is eventually defeated by the law. Drawing, among other things, on theories of cultural memory and trauma, this article discusses — through an analysis of both Donne armate and a number of television programmes on terrorism broadcast in the early 1990s — the political potentialities and limits of television in processes of healing and national reconciliation.

Francesco è vivo, e lotta insieme a noi! Rebuilding local identities in the aftermath of the 1977 student protests in Bologna

The decade spanning from 1968 to 1980, known also as the anni di piombo, is among the most difficult and traumatic periods in Italian post-war history. One of the most memorable years of this decade was 1977, when a new student movement stood up against the established order. The so-called Movement of ’77 manifested itself among others in Bologna, where it had a predominantly creative and joyful character. Nevertheless, the protests were violently struck down when left-wing student Francesco Lorusso was killed by police forces during clashes, resulting in an urban guerriglia. This incident worsened the relationship between the historical left and younger generations of (more radical) left-wing activists, and marked the beginning of the end of the Movement of ’77. The chapter on 1977 was, however, never really closed, and a ‘counter-memory’ has continued to divide the local community ever since. In this article, we shall see how different memory communities in Bologna have dealt with this ‘collective traum...

Women's Studies 2.0. Italian Feminist Scholarship in the Digital Age

ABSTRACT The Italian women’s movement of the 1970s was one of the largest and most diverse in Europe. However, after the movements decline in the late 1970s, scholarly interest in women studies and in the history of second-wave feminism has primarily been upheld through the creation and promotion of womens archives, documentary centres and libraries. More recently, new generations of women have engaged in battles for womens rights, debates about gender issues and feminist scholarship, relying increasingly on new media technologies and social media. It is tempting to conclude that the generation gap that so often marks the relationship between different feminist generations is enhanced by such a technological divide. This article, instead, challenges this assumption by studying the case of an information-based organization that was created in the early 1980s by a group of local feminists in the Italian city of Bologna, and which adopted a strongly digital approach to historical scholarship in the early 1990s. What is the impact of a similar, digital approach to womens history on the nature of historical scholarship and the shape of the archive? Can the digital break through academic hierarchies and institutional barriers, and give a voice to those who have long remained outside of official historiography?

A Room of One’s Own. Feminist Intersections between Space, Women’s Writing and Radical Bookselling in Milan (1968–1986)

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between space appropriation and women’s writing and publishing activities, in the context of second-wave feminism in Milan. From the early 1970s onwards, Milan’s feminist movement – which arose from the conjunction between transnational, national and local factors – engaged in a variety of translating, writing and publishing projects. In fact, Milan was one of the first Italian cities to publish translations of foreign feminist texts. More importantly, it was the site of the earliest feminist theoretical production in Italy. The article argues that, at different points of the decade, the empowering act of writing, publishing and circulating feminist knowledge reflected a search for a more profound consciousness of the female self which was intricately connected to the (symbolical and material) appropriation of women-only spaces in the city. In particular, it discusses three different expressions of this interaction between physical and discursive space: the feminist publishing house Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, the Libreria delle donne di Milano and the 150 hours monographic courses in the Affori neighbourhood.

The Lost Wave: women and democracy in post-war Italy, by Molly Tambor

It’s 9.15pm and all is quiet in the long corridor... The busy, ceaseless, complex traffic of the hospital has come to a stop. The consultations and the seminars are over for one day; the decisions, about life, death, pain and peace have been made; the lady with the mobile vacuum cleaner sometimes homesick for Barbados (‘it comes over me sometimes like a wave, dear’) has returned to Camberwell; the handsome friendly young man from Mauritius who brings me The Times every morning is watching the telly... ; and all the others who bring water, food, messages, mobile libraries, flowers and friendliness are now busy with their own affairs. On the ward only the nursing staff are still with us. They may not be visible as one struggles onto the bridge to have a last look at the Thames. (p. 207)