Luisa Passerini

La memoria y la utopía identifican dos disposiciones del sujeto, una vuelta hacia el pasado y otra hacia el futuro, siendo ambas actitudes críticas respecto al presente. La intersubjetividad define el eje central de la obra: la memoria es concebida como puente entre el pasado y el presente, entre el silencio y la palabra, entre lo singular y lo colectivo, y, en consecuencia, como una narración estructurada como forma de olvido individual y colectivo. La utopía es analizada en dos de sus formas históricas: como compromiso crítico con la cultura y la sociedad, restituyendo y haciendo posible el mantenimiento del estado de deseo en una comunidad no étnica (tal como la del 68 francés), y la formulación de una concepción del ser europeo que critica toda forma de eurocentrismo y reconoce la aportación del otro (ya sea por motivo de género o raza) como constitutivo de la cultura europea.

La primacía de la intersubjetividad

Memoria y utopía

Gender and Memory brings together contributions from around the world and from a range of disciplines--history and sociology, socio-linguistics and family therapy, literature--to create a volume that confronts all those concerned with autobiographical testimony and narrative, both spoken and written. The fundamental theme is the shaping of memory by gender. This paperback edition includes a new introduction by Selma Leydesdorff, coeditor of the Memory and Narrative series of which this volume is a part. Are the different ways in which men and women are recalled in public and private memory and the differences in men's and women's own memories of similar experiences, simply reflections of unequal lives in gendered societies, or are they more deeply rooted? The sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, the widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women's lives to focus on family and household, suggest that these experiences may be reflected in different qualities of memory. The contributors maintain that memories are gendered, and that the gendering of memory makes a strong impact on the shaping of social spaces and expressive forms as the horizons of memory move from one generation to the next. They argue that in order to understand how memory becomes gendered, we need to travel through the realms of gendered experience and gendered language.

Gender and Memory

Understanding Europe's past became an urgent matter with the events of August 1991 in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. The invasion of Moscow's streets by Russian people rejecting an attempted coup d'etat was the culmination of a process that had been initiated years before and raised crucial questions: To what extent can these events be considered the end of an era stretching from World War I to the 1980s, when Europe experienced many forms of dictatorship? To what extent can the various forms of dictatorship Europe experienced in the twentieth century be grouped together? Can any sort of affinity be established between them? The new introduction to the paperback edition of this volume in the Memory and Narrative series, Leydesdorff and Crownshaw underline the fundamental importance of the struggle for memory and its meaning. Memory and Totalitarianism explores the remembered experiences of individuals living under different totalitarian regimes, and examines the construction of memory in the aftermath of those regimes' collapse. It attempts to situate the findings of oral history in the context of contemporary memory. It wrestles with the most painful memories that Europeans have of this century at the end of the Cold War. These memories compare with oral history's research into such experiences as racist attitudes against blacks in the South, or the cultural and psychological effects of apartheid in South Africa, or the Aborigines' claim to their own history and to a new idea of history in Australia. Totalitarianisms are products of the twentieth century that go far beyond earlier manifestations of absolutism and autocracy in their effort to completely control political, social, and intellectual life. They were made possible by modern industrialism and technology. Therefore the theme of the book expands to include many other experiences that relate to totalitarian mentalities.

Memory and Totalitarianism

Tuuli Lähdesmäki

Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus

Iris van Huis

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today's Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe. Tuuli Lähdesmäki is Adjunct Professor/Docent of Art History and Senior Researcher in the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Luisa Passerini is Professor Emerita of History in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Italy. She was formerly Professor in Cultural History, Department of History at the University of Turin, Italy. Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Iris van Huis (PhD) is Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe

'Memory and Utopia' looks at the connection between memory and forgetfulness in Europe during the twentieth century. Drawing on oral history and feminist theory and practice, the book highlights how women struggled to be recognized as full subjects. The themes of utopia and desire in the 1968 movements of students, women and workers are explored. 'Memory and Utopia' examines the sense of belonging to Europe that has emerged in the last twenty years. The book analyses European identity as expressed through identities based on gender, age and culture to explore an inclusive and non-hierarchical subjectivity.

The Primacy of Inter-Subjectivity

Memory and Utopia

The year 1968 is symbolic in Italy of a decade of struggles by students, women, workers, intellectuals, and technicians. This work documents the intricate web of individual and communal experiences in the political movements of the 1960s. Passerini alternates chapters based on her diaries with interviews of other participants.

Italy, 1968

Autobiography of a Generation

Anthony Edward Waine

It has often been assumed that Europeans invented and had the exclusive monopoly over courtly and romantic love, commonly considered to be the highest form of relations between men and women. This view was particularly prevalent between 1770 and the mid-twentieth century, but was challenged in the 1960s when romantic love came to be seen as a universal sentiment that can be found in all cultures in the world. However, there remains the historical problem that the Europeans used this concept of love as a fundamental part of their self-image over a long period (traces of it still remain) and it became very much caught up in the concept of marriage. This book challenges the underlying Eurocentrism of this notion while exploring in a more general sense the connection between identity and emotions.

European Identities in the Twentieth Century

Women and Men in Love

Karen Diehl

Jo Labanyi

Europe and Love in Cinema explores the relationship between love and Europeanness in a wide range of films from the 1920s to the present. A critical look at the manner in which love - in its broadest sense - is portrayed in cinema from across Europe and the United States, this volume exposes constructed notions of 'Europeanness' that both set Europe apart and define some parts of it as more 'European' than others. Through the international distribution process, these films engage with ideas of Europe from both outside and within, while some, treated extensively in this volume, offer alternative models of love. A bracing collection of essays from top film scholars, Europe and Love in Cinema demonstrates the centrality of desire to film narrative and explores multiple models of love within Europe's frontiers.

Europe and Love in Cinema

Alexander C.T. Geppert

Liliana Ellena

In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.

Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century

New Dangerous Liaisons

Gabriele Proglio

Milica Trakilovic

Migration is most concretely defined by the movement of human bodies, but it leaves indelible traces on everything from individual psychology to major social movements. Drawing on extensive field research, and with a special focus on Italy and the Netherlands, this interdisciplinary volume explores the interrelationship of migration and memory at scales both large and small, ranging across topics that include oral and visual forms of memory, archives, and artistic innovations. By engaging with the complex tensions between roots and routes, minds and bodies, The Mobility of Memory offers an incisive and empirically grounded perspective on a social phenomenon that continues to reshape both Europe and the world.

Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders

The Mobility of Memory

Luisa Ricaldone

Edda Melon

Vecchie allo Specchio. Rappresentazioni nella realtà sociale, nel cinema e nella letteratura

Lisa Passerini is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turin. --

Luisa Passerini

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