ERIC Number: EJ1368312
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Oct
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0013-2004
EISSN: EISSN-1741-5446
Teaching against Omnipotence: Mussolini's Racial Laws and the Ethics of Memory in Times of Neofascism
Salvio, Paula M.
Educational Theory, v72 n5 p575-593 Oct 2022
This essay opens on the streets of Rome in 2019 among displays of fascist relics, architecture, and memorial sites. Each display speaks to Italy's violent colonial and fascist history, one that continues to be entangled with and to overdetermine Italy's contemporary restrictive citizenship laws and anti-immigrant policies. Here, Paula M. Salvio turns to a psychoanalytic understanding of omnipotence, and to Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, in order to pursue the half-spoken history of Italian fascism that is hauntingly absent from Italy's public school curriculum, as well as from sites of public pedagogy such as museums, cinema, memorials, and social media platforms. This absence raises important questions about the ethical obligation education has to teach against omnipotence in conventional classroom settings and sites of public pedagogy. Salvio concludes with a reading of a socially engaged project, the Holocaust Memorial located in the Milan Central Railway Station on Platform 21, that is aimed at teaching against omnipotence. The memorial stands as a site of conscience that is committed to making visible what was hidden for years -- the deportation between 1943 and 1945 of Italian Jews from the Milan Central Railway Station to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Authoritarianism, Racism, Social Discrimination, Legislation, Memory, European History, Ethics, Ethical Instruction, Role of Education, Jews, History Instruction
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Italy (Rome)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A