Building the Future: Transcultural and Transnational Dimensions of the Narratives of the Past

The contemporary change from exclusive national/communitarian memory narratives to transnational/transcultural ones, thanks to the progressive developing of a global memory culture and a global memory space, arises several questions about the processes of transmitting and safeguarding memory. In such a complex context, some actors acquire a peculiar relevance, distinguishing between memory representatives (the living memory, that is, the witnesses of past events) and the memory mediators which become narrators but also full-fledged interpreters of the past. Analyzing the second, it emerges the media role, because the communication and information technologies clearly contribute to preserving and spreading memory narratives to planetary audiences, opening the way to an unprecedented memory pluralism and at the same time to the risks of a “memory cannibalization.” From a different perspective, the phenomena of memory tourism may be able to integrate the subjective experiences in making the past present, because, benefiting from the memory place, the visitor not only participates in the reenactment of the past but becomes himself co-author of memory narratives.