“Racial Violence and Traumatic Memory in Southern European Visual Culture”
A guest lecture by Dr. Martin Repinecz (University of San Diego)
This talk will discuss the construction of traumatic memory in visual culture of Spain and Italy by focusing on film and TV representations of two incidents of racially motivated unrest: the 2000 riots of El Ejido in Almería, Spain, and the 2010 rebellion of Rosarno in Calabria, Italy. As a consequence of the international media frenzy each of these incidents provoked in their day, they have been imagined in a variety of film and television productions as the site of a conflicted, traumatic memory of racist violence. Yet the traumatic memory that these works seek to uncover and enshrine often offers ambivalent and oscillating answers to the question: “Whose trauma?” Following Michael Rothberg’s theory of knotted memories, this lecture will explore how the traumatic memory these representations produce is knotted between the violence experienced by immigrants and the trauma felt by Spanish and Italian societies upon disinterring their own suppressed memories of racism. The knotted quality of these conflicting memories underscores the precarity of Southern Europe’s belonging in the “Global North.”
