Landscapes of Memory. Trauma, Space, History,

The book is an analysis of 'trauma sites', those places that, since Auschwitz and more and more frequently today, were theatres of mass suffering and other atrocities and have then been transformed in sites of visits and tourism, although of a very peculiar kind. The book uses an innovative semiotic methodology to analyse selected key trauma sites. It is composed by a theoretical part, the first two chapters, devoted to the analysis of both the notion of trauma and the one of places of transmission of memories (sites, museums, monuments etc.) and by five different case studies: Cambodia, China, Chile, Argentina and Italy. The author demonstrates that these places can become, once properly interrogated, privileged observatories capable of throwing light upon the many different conflicts, forms of social control, and power relationships that underlie any politics of memory. The selfsame notions of trauma and memory become, in this way, rewritten in quite a different light: far from any kind of naturalistic definition, they emerge as painful ‘knots’ within which many of the most crucial questions in the contemporary world are intertwined.