9.3. Forms of Resilience: Cultural Memory and Everyday Resistance

What is memory’s role in countering depopulation in marginalised places? In Italy, intense debate rages over the survival of inner areas afflicted by population loss, disinvestment in essential services (health, education, transport) and discursive injustice. Current public policy supports ‘progressive depopulation’ in many historic localities, especially in the South, leaving centuries of cultural heritage and cross generational collective memory to wither away. This scenario is contested by those who value Italy’s inner areas as important loci of community, nature and heritage. We ask how residents’ memory-making plays a role in decisions to stay/return, drawing on the concept of ‘restanza’ – a key word in the Italian debate, introduced by anthropologist Vito Teti. Restanza is the purposeful valuing of staying, whether physically or through actively remembering and valuing the place you left. By investigating how physical stayers and returnees mobilise memories of place, we read restanza as potential resistance: a non-resigned and non-passive stance in the face of resource debasement, public disinvestment and demographic decline. Methodology: Mixed methods research was conducted in a sample of municipalities in Calabria’s inner areas through a residents survey (n = c.1000) and in-depth interviews (n = c.100) with citizens working in political administration (mayors, municipal secretaries), education (headteachers), health (GPs, pharmacists), economics (small businesses) and community development (voluntary associations). Analysis explored memory’s role in place attachment and decisions to stay and/or return. Key findings: Personal and family memories are vital to restanza. Residents mobilise memories when explaining their attachment to places, both their pasts *and* their futures. These narratives counter the thesis of progressive depopulation and question deterministic readings of ‘natural’ decline. Following ‘positive demography’, we suggest depopulation in these areas can be resisted by policies that value memories and safeguard natural biodiversity, community support networks, cultural heritage and intergenerational exchange.

This paper asks how humor can function as a form of memory work that both negotiates collective trauma and resists exclusionary narratives of victimhood. Drawing on cultural memory theory (Halbwachs), postmemory studies (Hirsch), and affect theory, I argue that comedy constitutes a neglected register of intergenerational transmission. Trauma scholarship has largely emphasized silence, melancholy, or testimony as dominant modes of conveying violent pasts; by contrast, humor enables traumatic histories to be remembered in ways that sustain agency, pluralism, and resilience. As a case study, I analyze Narine Abgaryan’s Maniunia trilogy, an autobiographical narrative of Soviet-Armenian childhood, situating it within post-Soviet memory literature to highlight broader implications. On the surface, Maniunia offers light-hearted stories of familial warmth and mischief in a multiethnic Armenian town. Yet beneath this comic façade runs a persistent vocabulary of violence—within families, among children, and toward the nonhuman world. This humor-inflected violence encodes two distinct traumas: the Armenian genocide of 1915, transmitted obliquely through family postmemory, and the Nagorno-Karabakh war of the late 1980s–1990s, witnessed directly by the author. By translating brutality into exaggerated comedy, Abgaryan resists narratives of perpetual victimhood and models resilience through storytelling. More broadly, the paper demonstrates how humor transforms traumatic memory into a narratable form that fosters cultural continuity, sustains intergenerational dialogue, and strengthens democratic resilience by resisting monoethnic and exclusionary memory politics.

Since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, Herta Müller’s creative impetus has shifted towards political essays and collages, a medium that blends literary imagination with the cutting and pasting of colorful words and images. Müller has explained that this technique reflects her experiences of trauma and fragmentation under totalitarianism and serves to deconstruct oppressive ideologies. Its roots lie in her early sewing skills, where she compensated for a lack of drawing talent by developing dexterity in cutting, stitching, and assembling textiles: „Ich konnte nicht zeichnen, aber beim Nähen hatte ich geschickte Hände” (“I could not draw, but I had skillful hands when sewing”) (my translation) (Apfelkern, 221). When considering the etymological link between “text” and “textile,” both derived from the Latin "texere" (“to weave”), Müller’s background in sewing helps explain her use of textile motifs in her work. This connection underscores the interplay of language, materiality, and imagery as her prose and collages employ fragmentation akin to cutting and assembling fabric. Through these textile metaphors, she denounces oppression while weaving together motifs of resistance, defiance, resilience, and memory. Müller’s oeuvre draws heavily on the memory of life under dictatorship, employing sensory recollection and fragmented narrative to warn of democracy’s fragility. At the 2023 Demokratien in Gefahr conference at the University of Zurich, she cautioned: «Die Freiheit dürfen wir nicht als selbstverständlich betrachten. Sie könnte uns sonst gestohlen werden.» (“Freedom must not be taken for granted, or it could be stolen from us.”) (my translation). This reflects her insistence on cultural and political vigilance amid resurgent authoritarianism. By examining depictions of textiles in works such as Niederungen, Herztier, Atemschaukel, and Der Beamte sagte, this paper argues that Müller’s literary and political oeuvre constitutes an interwoven critique of authoritarianism and a call for democratic vigilance in Germany, Europe, and beyond.