In the last 20 years, more than 35 memorial museums of emigration have been inaugurated in Italy, including a «national» one. This growth has gone together with a marked increase in a variety of memorialization practices involving the topic. This new attention to past emigration, however, has resulted in a change not only in the volume of initiatives, but also in their quality. While quasi-private local memories had always been cultivated across the territory on the grassroots level, these new initiatives aimed at re-composing the fragmented memory of Italian emigration into an overarching and universalizing frame. Emigration had to be placed indelibly at the centre of Italian history, framed as a fateful event, an epiphany of a difficult past and, most importantly, a fundamental lesson for its future.
These projects were promoted by a heterogeneous variety of 'carrier groups' which, while resolutely local or national in their mission, were consciously part of a transnational network of similar initiatives. This had started developing in the '90s and it is still widening across the – mostly western – world, stretching and intensifying its transnational ties of dialogue and collaboration.
We analyse memorial museums of Italian emigration within this transnational trend, relying particularly, but not exclusively, on the theoretical and methodological tools of cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith 2003). Based on observation on the field, interviews and archival research, we reconstruct the Italian development of this memorial genre through carrier groups' strategies and moral motivations, accounting for both local dynamics and transnational templates.
Our analysis shows how the dominant narrative embedded in the museums is structured by binary categories of heroism and victimhood, triumph and trauma, failure and redemption. These narratives work both at the level of the exhibitions' historical content, describing the epic deeds of emigrants, and at a metanarrative level, on which we will focus the most.
Museums legitimize themselves by posing the opposition between active memorialization and culpable sloth as a fundamental moral choice for the imagined community. This core metanarrative is applied at two different levels of universalization. On one level it applies to Italian emigration, conceived as a unified historical event: emigrants of the past are currently victims because they are unjustly forgotten by their own community, and their status of victimhood can only be repaired through memorialization and recognition.
Memory, however, is also presented as a necessity, for the present and future. Claims of victimhood, solidarity and repair are extended to the abstracted and universalized figure of the migrant. Emigration museums claim that Italians should learn from the sufferance they faced qua emigrants, in order to understand the plight of contemporary migrants in Italy as elsewhere. In this account, Italians must not forget their origins, not to re-perpetrate towards immigrants the same injustice they had to face. This pedagogical and cosmopolitan narrative, mobilized contentiously, is indeed object of frictions with particularizing and exclusionary narratives.
We conclude by evaluating the success of Emigration museums in transforming the collective memory of Italian emigration, proposing possible directions for future research.
