Luisa Passerini, Conversations on Visual Memory

We welcome the invitation to review a book which puts conversations at its heart. Conversations between the two of us about migration, race and class have stretched over time and place, and been interwoven into our thinking, our research and our writing, some of it collaborative. The conversations that form the substance of Passerini’s book similarly stretch over long periods – some of them lasting several decades – and across continents. In reflecting on them in Conversations on Visual Memory, Passerini highlights her career-long interest in intersubjectivity and how knowledge comes to be made through relationships and interactions.1 The eating, walking and talking that, often invisibly, sustain academic work are here explicitly tied to Passerini’s intellectual journey, as she seeks to make sense of research material collected as part of a European Council funded project with the unfortunate acronym BABE: ‘Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’. There is a candour in exposing how the author herself came to frame things in different ways over time, something which effectively undermines the fetishizing of authorial projects and brings a distinctly plural voice. If nothing else this book is clear that the intellectual work of academics is often at its most productive, creative and generous when it forms part of a shared conversation. And, as Conversations on Visual Memory shows, this process can fruitfully encompass not only academics from other disciplines, but artists and film-makers too. Passerini also threads a further set of conversations through the book, between Italian language teachers and adult students on their courses, with stories to tell about experiences of international migration and the unsatisfactory terms such as ‘migrant’ that others often use to relate them. In this way she continues, and extends, a life-long concern with pushing at the boundaries of academic convention in a career which has encompassed anti-colonial, Leftist and feminist struggles and in which she pioneered oral history as an academic methodology.

Art · Class (philosophy) · Conversation · Dialog box · Epistemology · Intersubjectivity · Linguistics · Memory work · Nothing · Plural · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · World Wide Web · Communication · Computer Science · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy