Franco Baldasso (CRF 2017) has just published a new book, Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy.
During Italy’s transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past of Fascism emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. This book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. Authors stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Addressing questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in WWII, and the Holocaust, these authors revealed how social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise.
Learn more, and purchase your copy here.
