Son[i]a #246
Enzo Traverso
Enzo Traverso is a historian and professor at Cornell University. He specialises in contemporary Europe, focusing on the intellectual history of the twentieth century, from a comparative perspective. Traverso advocates an approach to history that covers and is aware of its own tools, limitations, and internal mechanisms at all times.
He believes there is an inevitable ‘cross between history and memory that makes it very difficult to write the history of the twentieth century, for example, without introducing some degree of subjectivity, of memory, which is very significant and shapes the historian’s work. […] Memory is a construct, it is not just the transmission of personal or collective memories, it is a process of social construction in public space.’ In this conversation Traverso discusses matters relating to this way of understanding historical memory and to the contrast between certain kinds of commemoration and human rights policies and the Islamophobic xenophobia that is currently haunting the Western world.
SON[I]A talks to Enzo Traverso about post-fascism and the emptying of the political, about the transformation of antisemitism, the politics of memory, the eclipse of utopias, and about some other collateral effects of early 21st century neoliberalism.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Enzo Traverso that we were unable to include the first time around.