Commemorative acts as discursive resources of historical identity

Abstract

Discourse plays a crucial role in determining how both persons and communities shape social reality and attribute meaning to experience ( Edwards, 1997 ). This potential is mostly evident when the contended object of discourse is history itself, which is a peculiar area of the cultural mind. Hence, the discursive management of the collective tends to generate interpretations which in turn might mould personal and social identities. Sharing the spirit of the “innovations” brought about by cultural psychology (Valsiner, 2009), the present paper is intended to highlight how institutional and public discourses communicate different degrees of responsibility for the history of their own national group and, at the same time, how individuals construe historical identities with different degrees of guilt towards past events. Through a qualitative approach—the “diatextual analysis” (Mininni, 1992, 2001, 2005)—this paper proposes to investigate the rhetorical strategies adopted on occasion of some important commemorative events by the institutional spokesmen, as well as by the public opinion, to elaborate both positive and negative histories of their ingroup.