The Poetics of Conflict Experience: Materiality and Embodiment in Second World War Italy

Sarah De Nardi

Nov 2016 · Routledge

Ebook

226

Pages

Eligible

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About this ebook

Seventy years after the end of the Second World War we still do not fully appreciate the intensity of the lived experience of people and communities involved in resistance movements and subjected to German occupation. Yet the enduring conjunction between individuals, things and place cannot be understated: from plaques on the wall to the beloved yellowing relics of private museums, materiality is paramount to any understanding of conflict experience and its poetics. This book reasserts the role of the senses, the imagination and emotion in the Italian war experience and its remembrance practices by tracing a cultural geography of the everyday material worlds of the conflict, and by digging deep into the multifaceted interweaving of place, person and conflict dynamics. Loneliness, displacement and paranoia were all emotional states shared by resistance activists and their civilian supporters. But what about the Fascists? And the Germans? In a civil war and occupation where shifting allegiances and betrayal were frequent, traditional binary codes of friend-foe cannot exist uncritically. This book incorporates these different actors’ perceptions, their competing and discordant materialities, and their shared – yet different – sense of loss and placelessness through witness accounts, storytelling and memoirs.

About the author

Sarah De Nardi is a Research Associate in Cultural Geography at the University of Durham. Her focus on embodiment and identity frames war and conflict as lived experience in the everyday. She has published in cultural geography, anthropology, history and archaeology journals and volumes, and is Assistant Editor of the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage. Recently she co-edited Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict (Routledge, 2016). This book grows out of seven years of research in Italy, the UK and Germany, and is informed by a close personal connection to the topic of resistance due to the fact that her grandfather was a Partisan. Her subjectivity as an Italian, European citizen and scholar is a recurrent theme in the book, lending a nuanced and engaging perspective to the overarching theme and the arguments put forth.

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