Memory studies in Trento – Multidisciplinary perspectives (con Noreen Kane e Marco Simonetti)

Current LIMS interns will present their research within the seminar series ‘Memory Studies in Trento – Multidisciplinary Perspectives’.

Noreen Kane (Cork Univ.) Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Reader in Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy

In the last three decades, numerous literary texts have been published by women writers with origins in Italy’s former colonies in the Horn of Africa. These works narrate the violence of Italian colonialism and its intergenerational legacy from a female perspective, filling in the gaps in mainstream Italian memory. In this paper, I focus on two such novels: Adua (2015) by Somali Italian writer Igiaba Scego, and The Shadow King (2019), by Ethiopian American Maaza Mengiste.
In both texts, the memory of Italian colonialism is juxtaposed with that of the Holocaust, which assumes a more dominant position in the nation’s collective memory. Analysing the novels through Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” (2009), I explore how the memories of these collective traumas dialogue, illuminating the processes of racialisation and avoidance of collective responsibility intrinsic to both. To further examine the issue of collective accountability, I investigate how specific literary techniques employed by the authors invite the reader to consider
their relationship to these pasts, which may reveal a degree of “complex implication” (Noji 2023;Rothberg 2019). Such an acknowledgement potentially invokes an affective response which may lead to acts of solidarity in the present.

Noreen Kane is a PhD candidate at University College Cork, where she works as an assistant lecturer. Her research, funded by the Government of Ireland and the National University of Ireland, explores the representation of intergenerational trauma in postcolonial Italian women’s writing. She has recently published articles related to her research in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2024) and Quaderni d’Italianistica (forthcoming 2024). Her research interests include memory studies, postcolonial Italy, transnational feminisms, and trauma theories.

Marco Simonetti, Memory and Identity in occupied Eastern Ukraine: The Case of the “Donetsk People's Republic”

Between 2014, the year of its self-proclamation, and 2022, when Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the authorities of the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" (DPR) established
a "mnemonic regime" à la Russe in the occupied Donec'k oblast'.In this process, the memory of the so-called "Great Patriotic War" permeated every aspect of public life in the DPR, with the support of the Russian Federation. This presentation explores issues of national and supranational identity related to the instrumentalization of the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War in occupied Donbas.

Marco Simonetti graduated in East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Bologna.
His main research interest is historical memory in occupied Ukraine. Since November 2023, he has been collaborating with Memorial Italia.