Reconstructing memory through the archives: public pedagogy, citizenship and Letizia Battaglia’s photographic record of mafia violence

Abstract

This essay shuttles between the archive in its literal sense as a site of storage, and in its figurative senses as a migrating, foundational concept that is fused with affect and speaks of memory and forgetting, disavowal and betrayals. I maintain that a productive ground for theorising the archive as a site of radical public teaching can be found in the public pedagogical projects of anti-mafia activists currently working in Sicily. In the following pages, I focus on the photojournalism of Sicilian anti-mafia activist Letizia Battaglia. Bound up with traditions of social documentary and autobiography, Battaglia’s collection of over 6000 photographs of the mafia’s internal war in Sicily works as a moving, portable archive that takes place at the breakdown of memory and challenges the world to understand organised crime as far more than Sicily’s ‘local problem’. Drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Masud Khan and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, I argue that Battaglia’s photographic archive creates a social protective shield that exemplifies how archives can psychically and physically protect communities who have suffered societal trauma by expanding the arc of remembering and, in turn, challenge the state repression of memory.

Keywords:

• public pedagogy
• archival memory
• photographic complaint
• mafia/anti-mafia
• social protective shield

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge Professor Burt Feintuch and the University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities, and Dean Ken Fuld and the College of Liberal Arts for their generous support of this project. I also extend my gratitude to Franco Zecchin, Deborah Puccio-Den, Amy Boylan, Mike Middleton and Piero Garofalo for their scrupulous observations and perceptive advice.

Notes

1. For documentation of human rights violations that fail to be addressed by the state due to legal obstacles, see, for example, the Amnesty International reports on Uruguay, the United States and Argentina (see: http://www.amnesty.org/en).

2. One way to define a trauma is as an experience or series of experiences that is absolutely unthinkable. The unthinkable, at once persistently haunting, resists an integrated narrative or even an integrated neuronal memory. Often, traumatic memory is made manifest in compulsive thinking or, conversely, is denied, dissociated or disavowed (see Young-Bruehl 2013, 40–1).

3. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has secured signatures from all UN members except Somalia and the United States.

4. For an analysis of Northern Italy and Europe’s role in the drug trade during this time, see Modern Sociology: Globalization and Urban Sociology by Mohanty (2005).

5. Schifani’s position challenges that of the female martyr who trades political engagement for her life as we see, for example, in the public memories circulating around the memories of Rita Atria. As well, she represents a departure from the discourse of martyrdom so prevalent in the anti-mafia imaginary. For an astute analysis of this discourse, see the scholarship of Deborah Puccio-Den and Robin Pickering-Iazzi.