Parrhesia of historical texts on past in-group crimes: a risk or a resource for reconciliation?

Our study explores the effects of two different kinds of text addressed to young Italian students, which convey -- either in a clear and parrhesiastic (Foucault, 1983; 2001) or in an evasive way -- war crimes happened during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935-36) and currently covered by a collective amnesia. 70 Italian university students read two versions (parrhesiastic vs. evasive) of the same historical text, narrating Italian war crimes during the invasion of Ethiopia. This text was inserted in a self-administered questionnaire constructed through PsychoPy (www.psychopy.org) on attitudes and emotions about the Italian colonial past. Each participant was videotaped when reading the text. Questionnaires' results showed that participants reading a parrhesiastic text self-reported changing their emotions about the national colonial past more often, compared with the evasive text. A fine-grained qualitative analysis of participants’ video-recordings showed –according to FACS (Ekman et al, 1978), and to a multimodal analysis of communication (Poggi, 2007) – different emotional reactions of participants exposed to parrhesiastic vs. evasive descriptions. After a week, participants were invited to recall the historical text and to support a pro-social activity meant for their in-group or for the Ethiopian group. Relations between immediate and delayed reactions are discussed.