Getting Over Fascism? The Italian Far Right and its Uses of the Past

16 Oct 2023

Happening On 18/10/2023

David Broder

Memory, Commemoration and Uses of the Past Research Cluster in CASiLaC

Wednesday October 18th, 15:00-16:00, Online.

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MTNiYmRjN2EtM2Q5ZS00ZWRjLTkwMjUtNzZmNzYyNDRmYjc5%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2246fe5ca5-866f-4e42-92e9-ed8786245545%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22d045bdfb-0f11-4126-9be2-d291fa68a503%22%7d
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/getting-over-fascism-the-italian-far-right-and-the-uses-of-the-past-tickets-732682742807?aff=oddtdtcreator
Faced with discussion of her party's roots in historical fascism, Giorgia Meloni often dismisses their relevance — claiming that the Italian right "handed fascism over to history decades ago". Far from simply "nostalgic" for the regime, leaders of the postfascist right have since the 1990s increasingly called for a "pacified" view of history, focused on the remembrance of victims, from Jews murdered in the Holocaust to the Italians allegedly "ethnic cleansed" by Yugoslav partisans. This relativism is itself deeply contentious, and Italy's official "memory days" created since the 2000s have frequently been focuses of heated battles over the role of antifascism in defining the Italian Republic's identity. Questioning any idea of a single national memory culture, this talk explores how an antifascist paradigm created after World War II, long opposed by parts of Italian society, has in recent decades been challenged by a more fragmented array of narratives about the past, closely connected to the rise of far-right forces in the country's political institutions