Un antirazzismo commemorativo. La Shoah, i migranti e i demoni dell’analogia

This article deals with the characteristics of commemorative anti-racism, its development and its articulations in Italy from the 1980s to the present day. The analysis moves from two assumptions: 1. both racism and anti-racism are exercises of memory; 2. the ‘never again’ rhetoric — which obviously presupposes historical analogies — was the most pervasive antiracist cultural device active in Italy in the last forty years. After having presented, through some examples, the main forms through which commemorative antiracism manifests itself, attention turns to the point of origin of that system of cultural representations. The article illustrates how it was in the Eighties, a historical phase in which Italy begins to deal with new migratory phenomena and a moment in which — at the same time — the memory of the Shoah is imposing itself in the cultural industry, that such anti-racist rhetorical code began to take shape.

Keywords: ; Anti-Racism, Holocaust Memory, Historical Analogies

• Verso una sistematizzazione degli studi sulle eredità culturali del colonialismo italiano. Riflessioni a partire da due contributi recenti Elena Cadamuro, in ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA 310/2026 pp.218
  DOI: 10.3280/IC310-oa2
• Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Twentieth-Century Italy Marcella Simoni, Davide Lombardo, pp.1 (ISBN:978-3-030-98656-8)

Guri Schwarz, Un antirazzismo commemorativo. La Shoah, i migranti e i demoni dell’analogia in "ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA" 297 Suppl./2021, pp 145-179, DOI: 10.3280/IC2021-297-S1OA-007