Project description
Despite the temporal distance, Italy and Germany have presently begun to recognize their ethical “implication” (Rothberg 2019) into the crimes of colonialism. The revival of these vital but marginalized memories challenges the core of these countries’ national identities contradicting the singularity of the Holocaust (Rigney 2014) and the embellishment of Italian colonialism (Ponzanesi 2012). This project understands German and Italian authors of postcolonial fiction and memory activists as two types of “memory entrepreneurs” (Pollak 1993), who in different manners criticize Germany’s and Italy’s amnesia of their colonist crimes. Linking postcolonial theory with the theories from the transnational and activist turn in memory studies, it juxtaposes the two cases by exploring how key agents make colonialism “memorable” (Rigney 2021) and create “multidirectional” (Rothberg 2009) narratives that interlink various traumatic histories and revise urban spaces that honour the colonial past.
The resecarch group
Jessica Ortner
Anne-Folke Hansen
Pia Schwarz Lausten
Postdoc TBA
Photo: The Askari-Relief in Hamburg