Pre-emptive Memories. Anticipating narratives of Covid-19 in practices of commemoration

This article explores the narratives of the Covid-19 crisis in Italy, in the ways that they intersect with cultural memory processes. Moving from the hypotheses that the Covid-19 crisis, in Italy, has undergone two distinct narrative phases, we focus on the comparison between the forms taken, during the first lockdown, by an important (but also somehow divisive) memory ritual: the celebration of April 25 (the day that Italy was liberated from Nazi-Fascism) and the newly established commemorations of Covid-19 casualties. The aim is to observe the osmoses between two discursive domains (memory discourse vs. emergency discourse). To do so, we propose the concept of ‘pre-emptive memory’, which can be defined as an act of – unwitting – anticipation, pre-figuration and re-combination of the future cultural memory of an ongoing event in the present.