Commemoration and processes of appropriation: The Italian Communist Party and the Italian Resistance (1943–48)

Abstract

Scholarship on collective memory often conceives struggles over the past as directly dependent on the structure of interests in the present. However, temporal constraints affect the way the past is selected and represented. In this article I focus on the appropriation of the memory of the Resistance by the Italian Communist Party in the years between 1943 and 1948. I highlight, following a growing literature on the path dependence of memory, that the consolidation of the memory of this period was conditioned not only by the political culture of the organization, but also by the internal dynamics and the specific genre of communist commemoration.

From lines to networks: Calendars, narrative, and temporality

“…The representation of the past is constrained both by the context in which memory-work takes place and by peculiar trajectories of commemoration in which both the “history of memory” and the “memory of memory” affect the presence, the salience, and the valence of representations (Cossu, 2011; Jansen, 2007; Olick, 1999; Saito, 2006). At the same time, memory is not simply an autonomous cultural system (Schwartz, 1996); it is embedded in broader cultural profiles (Olick, 2007) as well as in “fields” in which actors with varying power and symbolic capital struggle or cooperate for the definition of the past.…”

The Chronicles of Long Kesh: Provisional Irish Republican memoirs and the contested memory of the hunger strikes

“…It is a commonplace to recognise the key significance of the hunger strikes for the Provisional movement, and their place within the collective memory of the movement has been kept burning brightly over the course of the last 30 years. As has been noted in the different, but related, context of communist cultures of memorialisation, there is a pronounced ‘tendency to perceive commemorative practices mainly as opportunities for political mobilization’ (Cossu, 2011: 391). This occurred in a double sense: first, in terms of mobilising the movement’s members and supporters around contemporary political goals (as defined by the leadership); second, in terms of the socialisation of younger cadres, involving the inter-generational transmission of political and cultural understandings.…”

“…In the case of the Italian Communist Party’s approach to commemorate the wartime Resistance movement, Cossu argued that the conscious construction and dissemination of partisans’ biographies (through the party press, for instance) represented a concerted effort to monopolise and control the important symbolic capital that was attached to the Resistance. This ‘extensive use of biography as a peculiar genre of commemoration established continuities within the history of the party: it incorporated the young partisans in a more general and teleological framework of struggle and sacrifice …’ (Cossu, 2011: 391). The Irish Republican movement has attempted to use the biographies of the hunger strikers (particularly the ‘officer commanding’ and first hunger striker to die, Bobby Sands) in a comparable fashion.…”

“…As Frampton (2011) points out, the injunction from dissidents to support these prisoners is couched specifically in terms of ‘Remembering the 1981 Hunger strike!’: ‘such activity was symptomatic of RSF’s attempts to take possession of key facets of the Republican heritage …’ (p. 72). The legacy of the hunger strike, and the ‘memory work’ associated with it, has become a key element in a renewed battle over the ‘property of the past’ (Cossu, 2011: 387), but this is now centred on the political chasm that exists within Irish Republicanism, rather than between Irish Republicanism and the British state (although the latter struggle is still ongoing, as has been noted). This article argues that a significant, but under-researched, dimension of this battle over memory is to be found in the memoir-writing of key protagonists.…”

From commemoration to celebration: The making of the Norwegian Liberation and Veterans Day

“…This “genre effect” counters the tendency to see commemorative texts as wholly constituted either by the history of which they refer to or by the present context in which they are produced (Olick, 1999: 384). A memory “genre” consists of the accumulated succession of commemorations, a memory of previous memories, which shape, guide and constrain attempts at inventions of new traditions (Cossu, 2011; Olick, 1999; Saito, 2006).…”