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 speak- ing 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 eva- sive 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 ques- tionnaire (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; 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).