MEMORY AND NARRATION OF HISTORY AS WEAPONS TO RESIST THE CANCELLATION OF SICILY FROM THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF ITALY

The hypothesis that I intend to put forward as one of the possible explanations of such territorial recognition and identification is linked to the historical-political need to resist the process of cancellation of the Sicilian identity and its entity from the official map of national power and of European socio-cultural geography. It is as if it had become necessary to give life to a narrative to counter this process of cancellation, caused and wanted by the Italian Unification, a political operation created in northern Italy and dispatched to Sicily with all the connotations of the colonial operation. My object will be to reconstruct the confrontation between local narration and the narration of “others” as a conflict. Conflict that manifests itself as a different vision of things, but which over time becomes a political and economic conflict, very concrete conflicting interests on development policies and the placement of the workforce. Suffice it to recall that the narrative of peasant, illiterate and backward Sicily served in the fifties and sixties to encourage mass emigration and to move labor from the south to the northern Italy of the economic miracle.