Making room for negative emotions about the national past: An explorative study of effects of parrhesia on Italian colonial crimes

In this paper we discuss the utility of parrhesia ( Foucault, 1983, 2001) in intergroup relations, in particular we examine the importance of the communicative choice of speaking frankly when narrating in-group war crimes to perpetrators’ descendants. Our study explores, through a quasi-experimental procedure, the effects of two different kinds of text addressed to young Italian students, which convey either in a parrhesiastic or in an evasive way war crimes that happened during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935–1936). Although historically well-proven, these colonial crimes are covered until now by a widespread intergenerational silence ( Pivato, 2007) and are therefore surprising for these participants. 67 Italian university students (average age: 23.51) read two online versions (parrhesiastic vs. evasive) of the same historical text, inserted in a self-administered questionnaire (http://www.psychopy.org). Each participant was videotaped when filling in the questionnaire and reading the text. Quantitative results of self-report showed that reading the parrhesiastic text affected experienced emotion more than the evasive text. Participants’ identification with the in-group showed no significant interactions with the narrative's effects. A fine-grained ( Ekman et al., 1978 and Poggi, 2007) analysis of participants’ video-recordings confirmed this quantitative data, showing rich emotional reactions of participants. We propose that these emotions, if well regulated (Frijda, 2013), could play a positive role, making more evident the need to repair the moral image of the Italian in-group (Allpress et al., 2014). The choice of parrhesia may therefore help perpetrators’ descendents to cope at the same time with the two opposed aims of protecting the state symbology ( Liu et al., 2014), and of advancing intergroup reconciliation processes (Nadler & Shnabel, 2008).