Facing the unknown crimes of older generations: Emotional and cognitive reactions of young Italian students reading an historical text on the colonial invasion of Ethiopia

Peace Psychology Book Series

Sarrica

2019

Self Cite

This chapter has three aims. First, it aims to disentangle social denial of in-group responsibilities for intergroup violence from other types of silence about intergroup violence. Secondly, it argues that intergenerational narratives which omit information about in-group responsibilities for violence that occurred before the birth of younger generations are highly risky to the descendants of perpetrators. Finally, it emphasises the importance of exploring in greater depth the understudied moment when a literal social denial about past in-group war crimes is exposed. To support these aims, the chapter presents results from a recent mixed methods, quasi-experimental study, which used between- and within-subject comparisons. The study asked young Italian university students to read an explicit text (“detailed text”) vs. a more nuanced one (“mild text”) about Italian war crimes occurring during the colonial invasion of Ethiopia. Data were collected before reading the text, during the reading and after it. Texts were constructed by manipulating the wording of a single historical narrative, taken from a textbook currently used in Italian high schools. The inclusion of this information in Italian history textbooks is quite recent, taking place approximately 70 years after the end of the war. Prior to this a widespread social denial silenced these crimes and as a result they were largely ignored in general social discourse. Results showed that participants reacted not only to the new information received but also to the way in which it was conveyed. The detailed narrative, by frankly taking a moral stance on past violence (a strategy that we named, after classic works of Foucault, 1983, parrhesia), provoked a better understanding of information, together with an increase of negative group-based moral emotions. Interestingly, while collective guilt did not differ between participants exposed to a detailed or a mild text, moral emotions distancing young participants from the responsibilities of older generations increased when these crimes were clearly exposed.

Section: Breaking the Silence On Italian Colonialism: An Applied Examplementioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Breaking the Silence On Italian Colonialism: An Applied Examplementioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Breaking the Silence On Italian Colonialism: An Applied Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Historical Culture and Peace: How Older Generations Address the Need of Younger Generations to Learn About Their In-Group Past

Peace Psychology Book Series

Sarrica

2019

Self Cite

Material Traces of a Cumbersome Past: The Case of Italian Colonial History

Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research

Licata

Mastropietro

et al. 2022

Self Cite

Physical daily contexts are replete with traces of the past. A statue in a park, the name of a street, or an old advertisement can all remind people of specific historical moments or periods. Often, they recall glorious episodes, but traces of less glorious pasts also persist. Among them, the most self-censored ones refer to past immoral actions that tarnish the overly idealized moral standard attributed to the group. As a case in point, material traces of the colonial past became the focus of controversies within formerly colonizing countries during the last decade. European anti-racist movements questioned the colonial heritage of European societies in an unprecedented manner and active social minorities also brought to the fore some traces still in the background of physical environments. Part of public opinion reacted by denouncing the “cancel culture” or the danger of “erasing” history. This chapter outlines a social psychological approach about contemporary perceptions and interpretations of still self-censored material traces of Italian colonialism. Results of a qualitative survey on Italian participants’ representations and attitudes toward a candy with a colonial wrapping will illustrate how Italian participants of different generations question this ephemeral trace and take on the challenge of a cumbersome past.

Is there a Space for Post-Colonial Theory in the Socio-Psychological Research on Consequences of Colonial Past?

2018

Integr. psych. behav.

The focus of my commentary is two-fold. First, I discuss what appeared to me as the central theoretical focus of the article; the possibility to create a space, if at all, for integrating post-colonial theory into the broader research field of social and psychological studies of the consequences of colonial past. Second, I intend to show why, in my opinion, the methodological choices of the authors and the criteria adopted for corpus construction allowed for data that, although too thin to establishing the state of knowledge in the field of study on consequences of colonial past, is nevertheless very informative and thoughts-provoking. My conclusions suggest that this study is an innovative attempt at describing and grasping the results of a search guided by two among the more consolidated electronic datasets currently available for English-speaking scholars. However, this study may not easily understand which can be the space to integrate post-colonial theory in the field of research on consequences of colonial past. To better reach this aim, it is perhaps necessary to build another kind of corpus, open to other languages (starting from French) and focused also on other scientific products, as books or proceedings of congress. In addition, disciplinary boundaries have to be even more explored, starting from interdisciplinary studies on education and historical culture. In spite of these limitations, I am convinced that this innovative study by Tomicic and Berardi tackles issues of relevance to any serious effort towards reflecting on long-term consequences of colonial violence and opens up to valuable new research questions and methods, to be taken into serious account and further explored in future works.