How to Transform a “Place of Violence” into a “Space of Collective Remembering”: Italy and its Traumatic Past” pp. 65-88 http://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/jtr

http://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/jtr

This article analyses cultural theories such as those offered by Alexander et al (2004). It will examine the consequences of these theories and their applicability to those cases where the access to the legal arena is not available for working through cultural trauma. Where there have been claims of “state terror”, such as in Latin America and Italy, access to the legal arena is systematically denied through a variety of criminal strategies. In Italy, for example, there is a long history of state collusion between part of the government and criminal groups like the mafia and the camorra. This collusion has deeply affected the functioning of the legal system that normally represents the most important arena for the expression of collective trauma. When this mode of expression is denied, the expression of trauma is pushed outside the formal legal and political system and into an anti-system, historically artistic/cultural productions. In these cases, cultural elaboration of the trauma takes place on the aesthetic level and the memories culturally produced are very often counter-memories. What are the consequences of this process both for the inscription of the crucial event in the public discourse and its relation with justice? And moreover, how do the aesthetic codes affect the public definition of justice and the collective understanding of what happened?