The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right

Description

In the concise chapters of this extended essay, Pisanty critiques the weaknesses of dominant memory across various aspects of public discourse. She challenges the sacralization of witness testimony, the rigidity of collective memory, the banality of “Holocaust tourism,” the formulaic tropes of popular film, and the punitive nature of memory laws. A key feature of this paradigm, she argues, is its rigid dichotomy of victims and perpetrators, a framework she calls the “familiar schema persecuted vs. persecutor.”

About the Author

Valentina Pisanty is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bergamo and a leading scholar of Holocaust denial, racism, and collective memory. She has written extensively on interpretive semiotics, narratology, political discourse, and the rhetoric of racism. She was the editorial coordinator of Accepting Diversity, an interactive manual on tolerance developed from a project with Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, and Jacques Le Goff. Her books include Leggere la fiaba(1993), Semiotica e interpretazione (with Roberto Pellerey, 2004), La difesa della razza (2006), and L’irritante questione delle camere a gas (1998; expanded edition, 2014), all published by Bompiani.