Memories of the Italian colonial past

Paolo Jedlowski Public memory and its failings

struggled against the oblivion to which certain themes have been consigned; however, it has almost never dealt with colonialism. This is not only true of I am not an expert on colonial history. My perspec- cinema: until the last few years, none of the media tive is that of the sociology of memory. The theme dealt with this subject. It is a theme on which public came to me when I was working on a book about memory as a whole long remained silent. A few years ago, Marita Rampazi and Anna Edgar Reitzs lm Heimat and its role in the history of the construction of European memory.1 Lisa Tota, two promoters of the sociology of memory in Italy in recent Heimat opens with the years, published a book on image of a survivor of the Paolo Jedlowski is Professor of Sociology public memory (Rampazi and battleelds of the First World at the University of Calabria (Cosenza, Tota 2007), containing essays War. Like the survivors Italy). His main research elds are social by authors from different Walter Benjamin describes in theory and sociology of culture. He has countries. The denition of Der Erzhler (The Storywritten widely on collective memories and edited the Italian translation of Maurice public memory it presents teller) (Benjamin 1937), this Halbwachs La Mmoire collective. is anything but unequivocal. young man is dumb: he has a Email: jedlowsk@unical.it In introducing the book, I wealth of lived experiences suggested an interpretation of (Erlebnisse), but no experience (Erfahrung). His past is foreign to him. the term as a set of images of the past that circulate Beyond the gure of the survivor, the lm keeps in the public sphere (Jedlowski 2007). In modern democratic societies the public returning to the issue of the inability to tell ones story and, through telling, to appropriate ones own sphere is where the citizens beliefs concerning experience. Heimat relates the history of a German matters of collective importance come into contact family through the twentieth century. Connected at and mutually inuence each other, gradually certain crucial moments to some of that centurys becoming modied and contributing to the formamost traumatic events, including the Nazi years tion of public opinion. This understanding coinand the Holocaust, this is nevertheless a history of cides with Habermass (1962) concept and refers the inability to tell ones story, for which the lm to a set of accessible discursive practices seeks to compensate. It replaces a narrative circuit, expounded in public, where public is understood broken several times at comparatively crucial not in the institutional sense, but as a space in moments in the century, with a mediating circuit which private citizens interact, a network of disthat offers both compensation and the possibility of courses through which a societys members dene and discuss matters of collective importance. reconstructing the repressed past. For Habermas, the discourses and texts that Working on all of this and living in Italy, I wondered what an Italian Heimat might be like. circulate in and dene the public sphere relate to Such a lm would work on many repressed ele- the general interest, in other words primarily the ments of the past. Arthouse cinema in Italy has often evaluation and monitoring of government action.

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But the public sphere has never been and is not solely about politics in the strict sense. At rst, as Habermas himself notes, it was identied primarily as a sphere of debate based around literary texts: people meet, acknowledge, and criticise each other in public, and also through narratives and images, expressing and comparing tastes, feelings, and emotions. All this can relate to purely political subjects, and also to the denition of collective identity and its history, the reference values of the collectivity and the norms that should embody those values. Through the circulation of all these discourses, certain interpretative frameworks are publicly established, bringing order and also giving meaning to the lived experience of individuals. I shall leave aside here the discussions that Habermass concept has engendered and the different renements it has undergone.2 The point is that discourses circulating in the public sphere often also concern representations of the past. In this case it is possible to speak of public memory, as the image of the past that is publicly discussed. Here we should note that, as the concept of public sphere does not refer to what is public in the institutional sense, but to a framework of public communication between private citizens, in the same way public memory is not the memory promoted by institutions, but is constituted by discourses and cultural artefacts dealing with the past and located in the public space of communication.3 It would be equally deceptive to think in terms of a single image. The public sphere is an open space, inhabited by concrete subjects, driven by processes, conicts, and negotiations. Similarly, public memory is the ever-changing motley of countless interactive processes. Public memory fulls two crucial functions. First and foremost it is the site of processes for constructing the past which dene the criteria of plausibility and importance using which, from the vast heritage of traces of the past that are potentially available to the society and the groups of which it is composed, certain elements are selected and re-offered to the society as a whole. Secondarily, it is the site where the collective memories of groups living within a single society are juxtaposed: the space in which each memory is exposed to criticism from its counterparts. This juxtaposition can lead to dominance by one group or another. Public memory is also the site of a recurring struggle for hegemony over legitimate repre-

sentations of the past. But when the public sphere is fully functional, it tends, at least in principle, to favour reciprocal forms of recognition and thus, where memory is concerned, the expression of concurrent interpretations of the past.

Cultural media and public memory

Today the public sphere usually involves the media. Similarly, the constitution of public memory has largely been transferred to the world of media interactions. The fact that public memory is widely present in the media makes it possible to study its processes using notions from the eld of media studies. Tools that are now classic, including agenda-setting analysis, and concepts such as the spiral of silence are similarly pertinent to the study of the formation of public memory. If a certain aspect of the past is never publicly discussed, the amount of consideration given to it by each citizen is greatly reduced. If it is discussed the converse is true: it is talked about, everyone can link their own memories to it, people adopt positions in relation to it. When they circulate in the public sphere, the representations of the past offered by the media construct a background of importance and plausibility within which individual memories and knowledge can have a place (Zerubavel 1997). The available studies tend to concentrate on the daily press and television. In addition, they are almost exclusively concerned with information. But there are other media and other types of discourse, such as novels, lms, and plays the vast motley world of ction. All these elements are fully involved in public memory. They belong to it because they circulate and are discussed in public and because they contribute substantially to the construction of the images of the past that audiences remember, and which are afterwards regarded as plausible and important. Fiction often deals with the historical past. It is not historiography, but in its own way it teaches history. The presence or absence of a particular historical theme at different periods in a countrys lms, for example, is an indicator of the attention granted to it and indeed the degree to which citizens are able to discuss it. Not that cinema reects widespread orientations precisely. Cinema never reects reality; indeed sometimes it acts as an

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expression of active minorities seeking to put something on the agenda. Be that as it may, the consideration or not of certain themes and the methods used (how much? and how?) makes a difference. This is particularly true in relation to the audiences ability to reappropriate their own experience of the past, which they may struggle to share and understand. Public memory is made of circular ows of communication. What is said in a speech or shown in a lm is taken up by someone else, discussed in conversation, cited in a documentary, and so on. Not everything appears: what matters in the public sphere are the resources of those engaged in the exchanges and the power relations between them. But it is here that the possibility that a particular theme will or will not be publicly represented is played out. For example, let us look at the Holocaust (obviously a paradigmatic example). Film and literature have helped to make it an important part of our past. This was a gradual process, marked by different phases. However, the appearance of lms and books on this theme is a clear indicator of the attention that has gradually been collectively paid to it, in synchrony with the successive phases of its historiography and public debate in general.4 In their own way and according to their own possibilities, lm and literature have contributed to the constitution of the Holocaust as the quintessential cultural trauma of modern western civilisation.

The lack of a cultural trauma of Italian colonialism

The same has not happened with colonialism, at least not in the Italian case that I shall consider here. In reality, the very notion of trauma is hard to apply in the case of Italian colonialism. I shall leave aside here the psychoanalytic and philosophical aspects of the term, approaching the issue by considering the paradigmatic validity acquired by the notion of cultural trauma in the sociology of memory. Starting from and generalising the case of the Holocaust, Jeffrey Alexander and others have recently suggested that what we mean by cultural trauma is constituted not of particular events, but the collective process that leads certain events to be identied as traumatic (Alexander et al. 2004). For these authors cultural trauma is an image of the past publicly maintained by a large

social group and referring to events or situations interpreted as a threat to the very existence of that society or a violation of its fundamental cultural suppositions. A cultural trauma can be identied when the members of a collectivity feel they have been involved in something horrible that has left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the group, marking their memories forever and irrevocably altering their future identity. But all this does not occur naturally: if it takes this form it is to the extent that it has been constructed as such by the society. As Alexander says, No trauma interprets itself. Before trauma can be experienced at the collective (not individual) level, there are essential questions that must be answered, and the answers to these questions change over time (Alexander et al. 2004, p.202). It is a matter of representation. The construction of this representation takes place in the public sphere and is integral to public memory. As Alexander also notes, it implies the existence of social groups with the power and desire to take charge of the memory of the events in question, to promote their importance, dene the damage they caused, identify victims, and attribute responsibility. We know that the memory of the Holocaust did not develop easily. Its emergence into the public sphere was due to pressure from different active minorities true memory entrepreneurs to borrow Grard Namers term (1987). The victims also participated in its emergence. The survivors did not keep silent and, over time, their voices gained enough strength and recognition to be listened to (that of the Jews at least; the same was not true of the Gypsies or homosexuals). But the victims of colonialism are primarily people of colour. In general, it has been hard for them to construct themselves as memory entrepreneurs in Europe. Conversely, at least where Italy is concerned, many oblivion entrepreneurs have acted with great success: all the specialists who have looked into the issue have noted the degree to which the civilian and military ofces in charge of colonial archives long opposed their consultation (Del Boca 1992; Labanca 2002). So the denition of the damage, victims, and responsibilities of colonialism has been, to say the least, full of gaps. From this point of view the absence of any prosecution of the perpetrators of the most striking colonial crimes is only one aspect of a general failure of recognition.

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This situation helps to explain why the process through which colonialism is transformed into cultural trauma has not taken place, in Italy at least.

Indicative lmography of Italian colonialism

During the colonial period, and particularly the fascist years, the colonies were depicted in lms and narrative; but, after the end of the Second World War, Italian cinema avoided them. Recent years have seen the release of Enzo Monteleones El Alamein, La linea del fuoco (El Alamein, the line of re, 2002) and Mario Monicellis La rosa del deserto (Desert rose) (2006). Both lms tell stories about Italian soldiers in North Africa during the Second World War. It has been said that these lms do not succeed in de-colonising the representation of the Italian colonial past (Capussotti 2009). But in reality the theme of colonialism (what are the Italians doing in Africa?) is simply absent. The only lm that has explicitly dealt with the memory of colonialism is Giuliano Montaldos Un tempo per uccidere (A time to kill, 1989), taken from the novel of the same name by Ennio Flaiano. There was, of course, Pontecorvos Battle of Algiers (1966), but that was about other peoples colonialism, in this case the French. When, conversely, lms made in other countries have depicted the crimes of Italian colonialism, they have not been screened in Italy. This was true of The Lion of the Desert (1979), a big budget international lm featuring stars such as Anthony Quinn and Rod Steiger. The lm portrayed the vicissitudes of the Libyan resistance and its former leader, Omar al-Mukhtar, who was hanged by the Italians. It was seen across the world, but has never been screened in an Italian cinema. Documentaries have also been subject to censorship. Fascist Legacy, a BBC documentary of 1989 on the crimes of the Fascists, led to protests from the Italian embassy in London. The lm was bought by the Italian broadcaster Radio Televisione Italiana, but never shown.5 In other cases, some very recent, the reason was not censorship so much as lack of interest. Haile Gerimas documentary Adwa: An African Victory (1998), depicting the battle of Adwa from the African point of view, won prizes in Italy, but was not shown in cinemas and

was screened on television only late at night. And while his later lm Tza (2008), which takes a complex look at contemporary Ethiopian history, received two awards in Venice, the reviews in Italy, though full of praise, barely mentioned its references to the Italian occupation. The recent processes of immigration have provided material for many lms. Their directors often tend to criticise the growing racism with which Italian society is imbued, but very few of them feel a need to talk about the colonial past. It is true that very few of the immigrants to Italy come from former Italian colonies. So it is perhaps hardly surprising that the only lm to refer to this is Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a man on earth) by Andrea Segre, Dagmawi Yimer, and Riccardo Biadene (2008), which gives a voice to Ethiopian refugees. But this lm one of the most raw documents on current migratory processes is screened only in arthouse cinemas, universities, and on YouTube.

Italian colonialism in literature

The situation is much the same for stories told in writing. The few novels that have dealt with the Italian colonial past have been called a literature of attempts at remorse (Gnisci 1999). Flaianos novel Un tempo per uccidere, mentioned above and written immediately after the end of the Second World War, comes into this category.6 It was based on Flaianos own experience during the war of Italys occupation of Ethiopia 19351936. In the novel an Italian ofcer meets an Ethiopian girl. He rapes her. Later, in other circumstances, he accidentally kills her. After this he seeks to cover his tracks. No one seeks to punish him for this crime apart from obscurely and indirectly his own conscience. But where the colonial memory is concerned, Flaianos book acts as a fable. From Nicola Labanca (2002) we learn that the history of colonialism can be split into different phases and relies on the presence of many actors. While, on the one hand, some works focusing on memories have been produced by former Italian colonisers, on the other hand, the veterans associations, military hierarchies, and parties have long cultivated a nostalgia for the colonial empire. In both cases the production of memory is conned to restricted circles. However, the states that have emerged in

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the former colonial territories have frequently asked Italy for aid and compensation and, in so doing, have compelled a certain reappraisal of the colonial past. But in the media these questions have been discussed only partially and are generally overlaid by the stereotype that sees Italians as good people, a stereotype reecting the Italian ideology of the decolonization period (Labanca 2002, p.456). The most important role in the attempt to revive the memory of colonialism and the denunciation of its misdeeds has been played by historians (for a long time almost solely by Angelo Del Boca). The debate they have generated has produced some results. For example, in the 1990s an Italian Minister of Defence ofcially admitted that the Italians used gas banned by the Geneva Convention in Ethiopia, in this case the mustard gas of the trenches of 1917. In 1997 the then Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro stated in Addis Ababa that Italian colonialism was stained by serious crimes and was a tragic mistake. He promised his government would return the obelisk of Axum (which arrived in 2005, ambiguously termed a gift). More recently, the Prodi and Berlusconi governments acknowledged the right of Gaddas Libya to some forms of compensation for occupation. But most people have remained unaware of these things, which have surfaced in the public sphere only occasionally. For a long time the colonial memory remained in a kind of limbo. The same may be true elsewhere, but in Italy I am convinced that it is the case. Italy lost its colonial territories at the end of the Second World War and has not experienced the debates generated elsewhere in Europe by the processes of decolonisation and struggles for independence in colonised countries. Sandra Ponzanesi sums the situation up as follows: in the discourses circulating in the public sphere,
The Italian presence in Africa is often denied or marginalized as being too brief from a historical point of view and too limited geographically compared to other European empires. . . . So it seems that for more than fty years the African venture . . . has formed our national unconscious. (Ponzanesi 2004, p.26)

riages. On the other, several famous authors have published new stories with colonial settings. This is linked to the entirely new presence in Italy of many immigrants who are mainly from Africa. As Alessandro Triulzi and Ruth Iyob write in the recent issue of a magazine devoted to the return of the colonial memory, the growing ow of immigrants from the formerly colonial world has reopened the memory of colonial divisions everywhere in Europe (Triulzi and Iyob 2007, p.23). In reality, the ow of immigrants to Italian soil has been apparent since the start of the 1990s, but it is only in the last ve or six years that the narratives I refer to have been published. So it can be said that a process is now underway to constitute the colonial past as a cultural trauma. However, the past can be revisited in different ways. The attention paid by some media is important here: it helps to restore the broken narrative circuit I mentioned at the start in relation to Reitzs Heimat. But the way this attention is expressed also matters. To take this further we need to consider some examples in more depth.

Modes of self-critical memory

The rst is the novel Lottava vibrazione (The eighth vibration) by Carlo Lucarelli (Lucarelli 2008). Lucarelli is a thriller writer, very well known in Italy, notably through television. The novel is set during the days before the battle of Adwa in 1896: the Italians were moving up through Eritrea in an unsuccessful attempt to occupy Ethiopia. Adwa was the greatest defeat suffered by a European army in the history of colonialism. For Africans it is a symbol (as documented by Gerimas lm Adwa). For Italians it was a long nightmare. In the novel the colony appears as a place where Italians give free rein to their desires in a way that would not have been permitted in their homeland. This particularly applies to sexual desire, with local women reduced to the status of prostitutes and concubines, but other desires gure too: an entrepreneur nd opportunities to launch particularly ambitious projects; merchants trade illegally; ofcials steal and act with unbridled opportunism; one murders children; a woman kills her husband with an impunity she would not easily enjoy in her home country. It is all reminiscent of

We have seen recent developments in this regard. On the one hand, in the last few years novels have been published by migrants from the former Italian colonies, often sons and daughters of mixed mar-

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Flaiano: Thats right, Africa is a storeroom for dirty business, you go there to loosen up your conscience (Flaiano [1947] 1990, p.71). The novel leaves no doubt that this was imperialism. However, the accent is primarily on the fact that in its Italian form it was an imperialism of rogues: ineffective, badly organised, and corrupt. This may be true. But there is no sign of the idea that colonialism, however successfully carried out, is in itself execrable. Moreover the publishers blurb on the cover, including the phrase where a dark page in our history becomes legend, is decidedly ambiguous. The word legend evokes something distant and blurred, but also heroic, in a sense not readily understood as pejorative. It certainly does not include or foster any kind of critical attitude. One thing Flaianos book did was to make us feel guilty. What of? That was not so clear Tempo di uccidere is no explicit critique of colonialism. But it did generate disquiet. Not so Lucarellis Lottava vibrazione. If there is disquiet here, it is focused on the perversions depicted, which are not exclusive to colonialism. Although Lucarelli documented his work with care, here colonialism is a background. The stereotype of good Italians is not endorsed, but the image of a rogues imperialism acts to minimise the crimes. The effect of the book as a representation of the colonial past is ambivalent: on the one hand it reects a degree of attention, an unfreezing of the theme in the public sphere; but on the other, it adopts certain commonplaces. So it reactivates the memory of colonialism, but does not adopt a position. The case of Volto Nascosto (Hidden face) by Gianfranco Manfredi is different. This is a comic book series (Manfredi 20072008) from Bonelli, a publisher highly respected in Italy. The book is aimed at children and young adults, who are readers of comics and graphic novels. Manfredi is also something of a celebrity. He is the author of the very successful Wild West adventure series published by Bonelli, Magico Vento, in which the good guys tend to be Indians rather than cowboys, and Native American culture is appreciated and described in detail. The authors sympathy, and that of his readers, is with the historical losers. In Volto Nascosto he shows the same attitudes to those who were oppressed by the Italians. Like the Native Americans, the peoples invaded by Italy also fought back; their cultures

deserve respect and it is possible to imagine heroes among them. Volto Nascosto is just such a hero: head of a band of rebels, he joins forces with Menelik and takes part in the defeat of the Italians at Adwa. In each album Manfredi provides historical and bibliographic information to accompany the story. In the rst episode the author notes that this story is ction, with history simply providing the backdrop to its fantastical adventures, but in reading each album the reader becomes better informed about historical episodes and individuals. Unlike Lucarellis novel, Volto Nascosto has an overtly critical emphasis. Manfredi is taking a stand. There is never any doubt that an act of aggression is taking place, and most importantly that it is unjust. Thus the story provides a selfcritical memory: its theme is the wrongs we have inicted on others. Self-critical memory is not so easy to recall. In Manfredis case, the operations success depends on what I might call the intertextual invitation offered by the text. Through the meanings attached to the authors career, the albums publisher and its style, Volto Nascosto recalls not only colonialism, but also what we know of the relationship between whites and Native Americans, an association which sets the critical tone. Manfredis readers are invited to shift their consolidated sympathy for Native Americans to the more problematic case of the peoples oppressed by the Italians themselves. This is not simply a matter of mentioning particular events. The work associates one memory that has a particular meaning with another memory. It is a remarkable characteristic of public memory that the meaning of what we remember is often generated by association. In the case of Volto Nascosto, beyond its invitation to remember certain things, the text almost seems to suggest a certain mnesic position (just as the semiologists speak of interpretative posture). The specic memory takes on a particular meaning through the constellation that is evoked. I now come to my third example: Gabriella Ghermandis novel Regina di ori e di perle (Queen of owers and pearls) (Ghermandi 2007). The author was born in Addis Ababa to an Italian father and an Ethiopian mother, and moved to Bologna when she was very young. The narrative genre is properly postcolonial: the authors experience is clearly a hybrid of two cultures and she deals with the problem of having an opaque, necessarily multiple identity. The theme is precisely

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the memory of colonialism and what it has left behind (Sossi 2008). This is a captivating book with a complicated narrative structure. There is a framing narrative and, inside that, a succession of other narratives, using turns of phrase reminiscent of the oral tradition. The framing story is about a problem of remembering. The protagonist has been in Italy for a long time, having received a student bursary in the 1990s. She goes home for the funeral of one of her familys elders, to whom she was close as a child, but the mourning process proves difcult. Resolution comes only when she remembers the stories the elder used to tell her, and the promise she made him to become a storyteller. During the mourning period, her friends and family tell her stories about the past in Ethiopia. At rst she resists this, but later it proves to have been a good thing. So the story is one of regaining memory, at once personal and collective. But it is the memory of a past that the Ethiopians and Italians broadly share. The stories that the narrator gathers from her African friends and family are full of Italians, of all kinds. The memory of the Italians use of mustard gas during the war in Ethiopia appears in many stories. But there is also the soldier forbidden by fascist law to take an Ethiopian girl as his wife determined to marry her at any cost, he escapes and eventually joins the Resistance and the Italian sergeant who secretly helps the young newly-weds. The stories of Ethiopians who came to Italy after the war tell of Italians who underpay coloured workers; Are there cannibals where you come from? an old lady asks her Ethiopian housekeeper, Do you have houses? and Do you have hair between your legs? When, in exasperation at this last question, the housekeeper lifts her skirt, the old lady screams that she has gone mad. There are also decent Italians who pay fairly. There are people who go back to Ethiopia to be teachers. Most importantly, there is Mr Antonio, who formerly worked in Ethiopia, fell in love with the country, and learned Amharic. But he never went back. First he says this was because it was no longer Italian soil. Later he corrects this: it is because he is ashamed. Ghermandis story does indeed reveal all that Italians should be ashamed of. But rancour is not its dominant emotion; the discourse is not unilateral. As Cristina Lombardi-Diop says in the postface, the novel is a gesture towards the

construction of a memory that, in contemporary Italy, nally marks the moment when this wound can heal (Lombardi-Diop 2007, p.258). It is an invitation to construct a self-critical Italian memory, but in this case the self-criticism stems from dialogue. In reading this book, the memory of Italians is enriched by what we do not remember, or remember differently. When those who have inicted wrongs listen to the memories of those who have suffered them, the memory of their actions themselves are irreversibly altered. Shame is no great reparation, but it signies that one has made the other persons point of view ones own. The texts cited thus far circulate in the public sphere. They have been made accessible by the publishing market; readers read them, and can comment on them, lend them, give them as gifts or recommend them to friends; reviews are published; their authors are invited onto talk shows; their references are on the internet. Like all products destined for the market, they were created for target audiences, which constitute partially distinct public spheres; but, by their very nature, public spheres tend to intersect. So what emerges is thus the start of, if not a discussion proper, at least a spread of collective attention directed towards a particular past, the rst steps towards the construction of a public memory of colonialism. I said above that Italy has not turned its colonial experience into a cultural trauma: some of these narratives can be interpreted as an attempt to start the process of transformation. Where the society as a whole is concerned, this attempt does not so far seem to have had much success. We should note that the attention paid to the colonial experience through these texts cohabits with the emergence of totally different attitudes. In this regard the photographic exhibition Lepopea degli Ascari Eritrei [Epic of the Eritrean Ascari] mounted at the Vittoriano in Rome in 2004 is exemplary. The exhibition, the opening of which was attended by ministers and senators linked to the right-wing government, used themes, images and stylistic characteristics that are features of colonial propaganda (Palma 2007, p.57). It magnied the loyalty of the Ascari savages freed by the uniform they wore to Italy; nothing was said of their motives for joining up, the discipline they were subjected to or the discrimination they suffered. The exhibition on the Ascari did not receive a great deal of media attention. In any case it sug-

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gests how much the return of the colonial repressed takes place in a potentially conicted context in Italy. The public memory is open to more than one discourse. As Labanca notes, There is a risk, in a now openly bipolar phase of the countrys political development, that we will see a repolarization of memories, rather than a dialectic and recomposition at a higher level (Labanca 2002, p.461).

The tricks of public memory

During colonial expansion, Italians and other Europeans maintained that they were the most civilised people on Earth. It is embarrassing to repeat this in the face of eye-witness accounts of the violence in which colonial conquests and regimes were steeped. Not only were these manifest, specic crimes, for which no European has ever been prosecuted; in the light of what we now regard as human rights, colonialism was a crime in itself: subjection, humiliation, the negation of the most basic rights (moreover it is inconceivable that entire peoples could be conquered without the use of extraordinary violence). The Italian colonial presence in Africa continued for over fty years. Roads and other modern infrastructures were built. But despite the myth of the civilising mission, the civilisation brought by the Italians stopped there. Their behaviour was predatory: theft and corruption were habitual; justice was exerted summarily, to say the least. In 1888 General Baldissera, commander of the troops in Eritrea, declared that the country must be ours, because such is the fate of inferior races; the Blacks are disappearing a few at a time (Del Boca 2005, p.74). The Italians used mustard gas against their opponents in the war to conquer Ethiopia, but they also repeatedly demonstrated their brutality during the occupation. The indigenous peoples were subjects, not citizens. The Italian colonies in Africa were clearly discriminatory regimes which used racial segregation (a form of apartheid) after the passing of the racial laws (Leggi per la difesa della razza) in 1938 (De Napoli 2009). The civilising mission was never more than an ideological veneer. But discourses referring to the supremacy of our civilisation matter when we are thinking about memory. We should recall here that the texts circulating in the public sphere interact with other types of memory. Memory is never just a matter of explicit representations: it also nds expression in

behaviours, attitudes, practices, and widespread notions seen as valid, which stem from the past and remain over time. Taking this into account, I think we can say that, even if it is not much discussed in public, the memory of colonialism has survived to the present day in Italy in other forms: for example in reiterations of a crude denigration of Africans, in negative stereotypes, linguistic habits, and ignorance legitimated by the idea of ones own superiority. Ultimately, this memory survives in the form of racism, which is a continuation of the ideological presuppositions that justify colonialism. Racialising taxonomies and colonialist policies persist in representations, attitudes, and the rules concerning migrants, currently supported by a majority of Italians. Those things that public memory does not develop remain latent within a society: the ways in which colonialism justied its own aggression, which have never been critically revisited, resurface like an underground river, ready to be readopted by the unscrupulous political elites, whom society as a whole seems incapable of opposing. In Italy today these unscrupulous political elites include the Northern League (Avanza 2010). Commenting on a terrifying selection of phrases uttered by representatives of the Italian government and local authorities, primarily members of the Northern League (invitations to take up arms against immigrants, reminders of the usefulness of crematorium ovens in relation to Moroccans, countless insults and scornful epithets), the journalist Gian Antonio Stella rightly noted, the idiotic ease with which Northern League sympathizers call blacks Bingo Bongo . . . is engendered by an almost total ignorance of what our own colonialism was like, and the absence of any sense of guilt for Italian fascist racism. . . . And we keep coming back to the same thing our unnished business with our past (Stella 2009, p.67).7 Such business must be settled in the public sphere. The issue is precisely one of public memory, or of the way that the past is publicly revisited and offered up for reconstruction by individuals. In this context, the self-critical attitude, although far from a majority position today at least has its own value: self-critical memory is the exact opposite of self-congratulatory memory. In modern times the latter is the form that the institutional public memory has most often taken, occasionally celebrating the past most appropriate to the vision of the victorious elites. Outside more

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institutionalised discourses (and also often within them), memory is just as often expressed in tones of nostalgia or demand, generating and justifying recurrent conicts.8 Self-critical memory is different: it is the most inconvenient of all, the memory that remembers not the things one can be proud of, or which can form the basis of a demand, but those that lead to shame; it is the painful preservation of ones own negative tradition (Siebert 1992). The development of a self-critical attitude in relation to ones own past (individual or collective) is part of the process of working through the past itself. The concept of working through is in turn derived from Freudian psychoanalysis: it refers to a particular kind of mnesic work in which the spontaneous mechanisms of private and (often deliberate) public forgetting are replaced by a conscious engagement with aspects of the past that are more worrying and hard to acknowledge. When these involve wrongs inicted on others, a moment of dialogue necessarily results: this mnesic work involves engaging with the memory of the victims; it involves recognising other peoples memory. It follows that the development of the collective past of colonialist countries leads to a selfcritical moment and invites us to interpret colonialism itself as a cultural trauma, where the trauma consists not of something we have suffered, but the recognition of the wrongs that our civilisation has been capable of inicting in the nonabsolving discovery of our violence. We must do this not to repent which is not very useful but in order to understand the mechanisms and causes of that violence, to construct the past, and take responsibility for it for ourselves.9

Today the idea of self-critical memory is part of European institutional discourse. In 2005 the European Union invited all member states to institute a Day of Memory (already established in some countries), expressly dedicated to the memory of the wrongs that Europe inicted on the Jews.10 This institutionalisation of a self-critical memory was a consequence of the discourses (books, narratives, lms, etc.) that had long been circulating in the public sphere, and kept reappearing there, and which set out the parameters of any discourse acceptable in Europe today concerning the persecution and extermination of the Jews. The colonial past will no doubt have to wait before being recalled to the public sphere in this way, but, where Italy is concerned, some of the texts I have cited seem to be moving in that direction. There is some resistance to this process and its consequences are not easy to predict. Personally I think it should be emphasised that self-critical memory is an important variant of public memory, without which it is difcult for a country to maintain a credible identity as civilised, given the incivility it has perpetrated. The quality of public memory is dictated by the texts in circulation. Advocates of a self-critical memory are in the minority, but they possess an ethical value that should not be ignored. The issue is not simply to restore the discursive circuits in which the past can be mentioned. The way in which it is mentioned and understood is at least as important. As Mr Antonio discovers in Gabriella Ghermandis novel, a self-critical memory of colonialism involves a certain degree of shame.
Translated from French

Notes
1. Jedlowski (2009). Reitzs lm, released in 1984, stimulated a major international debate (for the early stages of this, see Hansen 1985). 2. Notably Calhoun (1992), Crossley and Roberts (2004), and Jedlowski and Affuso (2010). 3. Some authors hold that public memory largely coincides with institutional memory (notably Havel 2005; Phillips 2004). Public memory then becomes the memory promoted by the dominant elites. Others conversely emphasise the difference between the two and call for analysis of the effects of todays media (Perra 2010, p.16). For a discussion, see Tota (2006). 4. The way it is formulated differs from one country to the next. For Europe, see Traverso (2004); for Italy, see Gaetani (2006), Minuz (2010), and Perra (2010). 5. For a more extensive account, see Siebert (1992). 6. Flaianos book was rst published in 1947; it was reworked several times by the author. The last and nal variant dates from 1968. 7. Stella has published another narrative set in the Italian colonies (Stella 2008) and on Italian emigration (Stella 2003; Stella and Teti

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2006); as with Manfredis Volto Nascosto, these publications seem to have a strategy of selecting associations in order to operate on the public memory. Associating the memory of Italian emigration with the current immigration to Italy alters ways of seeing, generating more sympathy than the fear and embarrassment engendered by other contemporary discourses. 8. On both self-congratulatory memory and memory coloured by nostalgia and demand, the historical and sociological literature is so extensive that it is almost impossible to choose even a few examples of texts in a note. There is also the question of the relationship between memory, collective identity, and conicts. On this, see Jedlowski (2001).

Paolo Jedlowski
9. On the notion of self-critical memory, see Namer (1987), Jedlowski (2009), and Grande (2009). The origins of the concept can be found in Adorno (1963). 10. Resolution of the European Parliament of 28/1/2005. On this see RI. LE. S. (2009).

References
Additional references common to Memory Studies can be found at the end of this dossier in the selected bibliography, pp.197202. Adorno, T. W., 1963. Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit. In Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Alexander, J., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N. J. and Sztompka, P., 2004. Cultural trauma and collective identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Avanza, M., 2010. The Northern League and its innocuous xenophobia. In A. Mammone and G. A. Veltri, eds. Italy today: the sick man of Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 131142. Calhoun, C., ed. 1992. Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Capussotti, E., 2009. Movable identities: migration, subjectivity and cinema in contemporary Italy. Modern Italy, 1 (14), 5568. Crossley, N. and Roberts, S. M., eds. 2004. After Habermas: new perspectives on the public sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Del Boca, A., 1992. LAfrica nella coscienza degli italiani. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Del Boca, A., 2005. Italiani, brava gente? Vicenza: Neri Pozza. De Napoli, O., 2009. La prova della razza. Cultura giuridica e razzismo in Italia negli anni trenta. Firenze: Le Monnier. Flaiano, E., [1947] 1990. Tempo di uccidere. Milano: Rizzoli. Gaetani, C., 2006. Il cinema e la Shoah. Genova: Le Mani. Ghermandi, G., 2007. Regina di ori e di perle. Roma: Donzelli. Gnisci, A., 1999. Poetiche dei mondi. Roma: Meltemi. Habermas, J., 1962. Strukturwandel der ffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der brgerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand. [The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity, 1989]. Hansen, M., ed. 1985. Dossier on Heimat. New German critique, 36, 1021. Havel, B., 2005. In search of a theory of public memory. Indiana law journal, 3 (80), 605726. Jedlowski, P., 2001. Memory and sociology: themes and issues. Time and society, 10 (1), 2944. Jedlowski, P., 2007. La memoria pubblica: che cos? In M. Rampazi and A. L. Tota, eds. La memoria pubblica. Trauma culturale, nuovi conni e identit nazionali. Torino: Utet, xiixviii. Jedlowski, P., 2009. Il racconto come dimora. Heimat e le memorie dEuropa. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Jedlowski, P. and Affuso, O., eds. 2010. Sfera pubblica: il concetto e i suoi luoghi. Cosenza: Pellegrini. Labanca, N., 2002. Oltremare. Storia dellespansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino. Lombardi-Diop, C., 2007. Postfazione. In G. Ghermandi. Regina di ori e di perle. Roma: Donzelli. Lucarelli, C., 2008. Lottava vibrazione. Torino: Einaudi. Manfredi, G., 20072008. Volto nascosto. Milano: Bonelli. Minuz, A., 2010. La Shoah e la cultura visuale. Roma: Bulzoni. Namer, G., 1987. Mmoire et socit. Paris: Klincksieck. Palma, S., 2007. Il ritorno di miti e memorie coloniali. Lepopea degli ascari eritrei nellItalia postcoloniale. Afriche e Orienti, 1 (IX), 5779. Perra, E., 2010. Conicts of memory. Oxford: Peter Lang. Phillips, K. R., ed., 2004. Framing public memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Ponzanesi, S., 2004. Il postcolonialismo italiano. Quaderni del 900, 4, 2434. RI. LE. S., 2009. Rammemorare la Shoah. 27 gennaio e identit europea. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Siebert, R., 1992: Dont forget. Fragments of a negative tradition.

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International Yearbook of Oral History, 1, 165174. Sossi, F., 2008. Il laccio delle storie. Studi culturali, 2, 297310. Stella, G. A., 2003. Lorda. Quando gli albanesi eravamo noi. Milano: Rizzoli. Stella, G. A., 2008. Carmine Pasci (che nacque buttero e mor beduino). Milano: Rizzoli. Stella, G. A., 2009. Negri, froci, giudei & co. Milano: Rizzoli. Stella, G. A. and Teti, V., 2006. La nave della Sila. Guida al museo narrante dellemigrazione. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Tota, A. L., 2006. Public memory and cultural trauma. The public, 3 (13), 8194. Traverso, E., 2004. Auschwitz e gli intellettuali. Bologna: Il Mulino. Triulzi, A. and Iyob, R., 2007. Il ritorno della memoria coloniale. Afriche e Orienti, 1, 24115.

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Zerubavel, E., 1997. Social mindscapes: an invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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