Featured Member shines a spotlight on the diverse research interests of, and the exciting projects undertaken by, those affiliated with the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. In this seventeenth instalment of the series, we speak to Stefano Bellin, a postdoctoral researcher exploring the intersections of memory, politics, and literature. His work examines how literature navigates historical legacies and contributes to broader discussions on political responsibility, war, and the ethics of remembrance. A specialist in the work of Primo Levi, he investigates how literature both reflects and reshapes cultural memory, interrogating its role in sustaining or challenging dominant narratives. Stefano has written extensively on the politics of memory, emphasizing how literature not only helps us understand the past but also opens up new ways of imagining different futures. In this interview, he discusses his academic journey, his research on literature and political imagination, and his perspective on the interplay between memory and the possibilities of social and political transformation.

Your work engages deeply with cultural memory and political imagination. What initially drew you to this field?

I grew up in an environment where politics was omnipresent, and I became interested in political questions (sensu lato) from a very young age. One of my grandfathers (whom I never met) had been the mayor of the little town where I grew up. My closest uncle is a trade union leader and a regional politician, who was active in the Italian Communist Party and continues to be involved in other left-wing parties or organizations. I vividly recall the alter-globalization demonstrations of the late 1990s and early 2000s in which I participated.

Photo credit: fotomovimiento.org

These experiences chimed with my concern for racial and social justice, which constitutes the affective and cultural matrix out of which my scholarly interest in cultural memory, global responsibility, and political imagination has emerged. Over the years I realized that my research addresses mostly historical and political issues by creating dialogues between literature and theory. In a nutshell, the goal of my work is to think about our life in common through literature.

Could you tell us a bit about your current research projects and how they contribute to broader discussions in memory studies?

I’m currently focusing on two research areas. The first has to do with the Jewish-Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. I am working on a (long overdue) monograph on Primo Levi, entitled The Shame of Being Human: A Philosophical Reading of Primo Levi, and I have almost finished editing a volume entitled Levi beyond Levi: Creative Engagements with Primo Levi. The monograph offers a novel reading of Levi’s works through the question of shame (what does it mean to feel ashamed as a human being?), and presents Levi’s work as a productive site to reflect on the ethical and political significance of this type of shame.

I explore how questions and ideas that emerge from Levi’s writings can be developed and recontextualized, opening new perspectives on the contemporary moment. Among other things, I interweave concepts and narratives that emerge from Levi’s writings with questions generated by the ongoing genocide in Gaza – which I believe represents a historical, political, and cultural rupture that we need to reckon with. In a similar vein, Levi beyond Levi maps out how we might interpret contemporary phenomena through a dialogue with Levi’s works.

The second research area in which I’m active has to do with the relationship between literature and political imagination. We live in a world devoid of any horizon of emancipation: when we look at the future, we see a looming ecological catastrophe, not a path for progress and better social conditions. Both at the local and at the macro level our world is defined by inequality, exploitation, oppression, and self-interest. The tide of resentment and anger is rising, but its waves are crashing on the wrong shores. Rather than tackling the root causes of our global problems, that immense affective reservoir is strategically deflected against migrants, minorities, and anyone who throws sand in the cogs of power.

My project starts from the assumption that cultural narratives play a crucial role in all this. And since literature is made of narratives and is a privileged place for analysing, challenging, and reimagining the stories we live by, I want to explore how it can expand our ‘sense of the possible’ (Hanna Meretoja). In doing so, literature can also alert us that ‘possible’ and ‘new’ don’t necessarily mean better. When Trump says that he wants to ‘clean out Gaza’ and turn it into a real estate opportunity, he is also expanding the sense of the possible, but in a blatantly fascist way. Is there any way in which we can expand and actualize our vision of social and racial justice?

Literature cannot be a substitute for politics, nor should it be. But it can be a productive training ground for reigniting our political imagination, and cultural memory plays a key role in this process. There is a double dialectical relationship between cultural memory and political imagination: imagination impregnates the work of memory, and memory stimulates imagination. In other words, the dialectic between memory and imagination is both internal to the two terms (it is part of their ontological structure) and external to them (it is part of their sociocultural relationship).

Much of your work explores the intersections between literature and political theory. How do these disciplines shape your approach to cultural memory?

Cultural memory is political, and since we are always immersed in cultural narratives, there is no neutral place from which to examine the past. Some scholars think that they come from Saturn and that they can jump out of the ‘fight between the past and the future’ and be promoted to ‘the position of umpire,’ as Franz Kafka writes in a famous parable analysed by Hannah Arendt. I believe that it is more intellectually honest and productive to put one’s cards on the table and make explicit from where we are reading, speaking, and thinking.

Besides looking at literary works as aesthetic objects, I also like to look at them as sites of theorization, as texts that expand and refine our understanding of the mechanics of cultural memory. Literature, political theory, and cultural memory intersect each other in many ways, but here I want to foreground an interesting dimension. Cultural memory is critical to examine our ‘shifting baseline perceptions’ on different social and political issues. The work of memory can sensitize us to our capacity of building different social arrangements, as well as to the historical legacies, problems, and untapped potentials of past social arrangements. And this can fuel our political imagination. To put it in a punchy way, if the motto of the present is ‘there is no alternative,’ the motto of literature and cultural memory is ‘there were and there are alternatives.’

You have written extensively on Primo Levi. What continues to make his work so significant for cultural memory studies, and how has it influenced your own thinking?

Primo Levi is, among other things, one of the most lucid chroniclers and interpreters of one of the key events of the 20th century, the Holocaust, an event that, for better or worse, played an essential role in shaping the field of memory studies. Therefore, by engaging with Levi’s works and by looking at how they have been discussed and interpreted over the years, we can reflect critically on the contributions, developments, and blind spots of memory studies.

Photo credit: primolevi.it

I believe that Levi’s works are classics in the sense that – to paraphrase Italo Calvino – they have never exhausted all they have to say to their readers. Levi left us a wealth of concepts, narratives, and open questions that are still essential and incredibly enlightening to think about in our present. Take for example the questions of murderous complicity, the memory of the offence, the abuses of memory, useless violence, the contagion of evil, the ethics of scientific and technological innovation, the issue of ecological degradation, the ethics of work, and so on.

Something else that I find very inspiring in Levi is his forma mentis, his commitment to truth and self-examination even when this might be painful and difficult. There is a strong parrhesiastic element in Levi, a ‘courage of truth’ that is rare and unyielding. The Drowned and the Saved is the best example of this. In that book, Levi is constantly struggling against himself and laying bare his uncertainties, aporias, and complex subject positions.

Having built a good part of his literary career on memory, he starts the book by questioning the validity of his own memories (‘Human memory is a wonderful but fallible instrument’). In the chapter on ‘Useless Violence,’ he tries to think from the perspective of the perpetrators; in the chapter on ‘Shame,’ he says that ‘we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses’; throughout the book, he questions his capacity to understand and convey what he experienced, and what will happen when the Holocaust will ‘belong to times gone by.’

Moreover, Levi implies that as a Häftling who had the ‘privilege’ of spending part of his time in the camp in a chemical lab, he also somehow belonged to the ‘grey zone’ (not in the sense that he collaborated with power, but in the sense that he became a privileged prisoner in a place where the struggle for survival was a merciless zero-sum game). The grey zone is first and foremost an analytical category that helps us dissect the microphysics of power, and only secondarily and problematically a moral category.

In your view, what are some of the most pressing questions or challenges facing cultural memory studies today?

The 2025 Mnemonics summer school, which I’m co-organizing, will focus on the relationship between memory and responsibility. I would say that this question is central not just to cultural memory studies but also to the future of our societies. With the rise of the far right, populism, ethnonationalism, affective polarization, and divisive culture wars, I often wonder if a responsible relationship to our past can ever become something shared by the majority of a country’s population. Even what was seen as a partially successful model – Germany’s memory of Nazism and national pedagogy about its dark past – is now laying bare evident structural problems.

A ‘responsible’ memory culture always involves the difficult and never-ending work of coming to terms with the past, and this is not a popular task. Understanding the past and reckoning with its legacies require self-reflexivity and self-criticism, and it’s difficult to win votes by foregrounding our implication (Michael Rothberg) in historical violence and injustice. Self-exculpatory narratives of the past will (almost) always have a competitive advantage in our mediatic culture sphere, and this constitutes a massive challenge for memory studies.

How can we move the Overton window in the direction of a more self-critical and culturally productive relationship to the past? In other words, how can we develop a responsible collective memory? I always stress that responsibility is etymologically and conceptually rooted in the idea of answerability. It has to do with how we (as members of a collective and as a community of memory) respond to a problematic and complex past, with how we give an account of ourselves.

Your work engages with both historical and contemporary crises. How do you see cultural memory operating in moments of social or political rupture?

When looking back at a particular historical period, we often say, ‘That was a time of crisis and profound change.’ This has become a cliché. If every year or five-year period is a turning point, then the notions of historical crisis and change lose much of their validity. Having said that, and at the risk of contradicting myself, I think that now the world is truly undergoing seismic social, political, and – dare I say – anthropological shifts. The chickens of modernity are coming home to roost (again), and this is intersecting with the epochal impact of digital technology, cloud capital, artificial intelligence, anthropogenic climate change, and tectonic geopolitical shifts.

Democracy is declining throughout the globe and has turned into a husk devoid of substance. We are sleepwalking into a global order dominated by racial fascism and plutocracy, where blatant violence, extreme inequality, and white supremacy are normalized, if not celebrated and paraded publicly. It seems to me that many people have not fully grasped the gravity of the situation, or they are too anaesthetized to do anything. The ‘everything everywhere all at once’ attack on democracy and the fragile infrastructure of international justice is leaving us stunned, unable to react. But react we must. The stakes are too high to leave the battlefield, even if what we are facing has much more resources and power than us.

What’s the role of memory studies in all this? I want to highlight three aspects.

First, cultural memory can serve as a warning, as an epistemic and affective background that trains our attention on potentially dangerous social dynamics. To fulfil this function, memory studies needs to maintain a dialectical relationship with historical knowledge and contemporary cultural criticism.

Second, the work of memory enables us to embark on an inland journey into the cultural and historical sources of the current crises. We often hear things like, ‘the AfD is rising thanks to its discourse on migration,’ but we typically assume this at face value without probing the deep sociocultural causes of such a global trend. But why do questions of migration and discourses that fuel racial confrontation and discrimination find such a fertile terrain throughout the world, and especially in the West? Why is there such a thirst for authoritarianism? Why, despite the atrocities of the past and all the suffering that they generated, are thanatopolitical social Darwinism and racism still permeating the cognitive fabric of many individuals and societies? What are the roots of the moral rot that led Western elites to support the livestreamed genocide of Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine?

Stop the genocide demonstration in London. Photo credit: Stefano Bellin.

To address these questions, we need to investigate the forgotten conjunctures that brought us to the current crises. Focusing on collective memory is critical to identify the cultural roots of today’s structures of feeling, as well as to track down continuities and discontinuities in mentalities and cultural attitudes. In this respect, I find Alberto Toscano’s analysis of ‘late fascism’ inspiring. Approaching fascism in the longue durée and thinking it as process and a potential haunting, Toscano manages to identify the patterns that enable us to speak of ‘fascism before fascism’ and interrogate the entanglements between neoliberalism and fascist desires.

Finally, cultural memory can be a source of hope. By definition, cultural memory reminds us of a world that was different, of different ways of living together, of different ‘spaces of possibilities’ that allowed modes of action, thought, and experience that might diverge from those that are prevalent today. In doing so, cultural memory provides a healthy reminder of the power of collective agency (for good or for evil). In a time trapped by a general Stimmung of powerlessness, disenchantment, and resignation, cultural memory can help us break the ‘iron cage’ of presentism and inspire movements that seek to change the status quo.

If you had to recommend one book, film, or piece of art that exemplifies the complexities of cultural memory, or one that has been particularly important to your own research, what would it be and why?

If I may, I would recommend three. The novel Minor Detail (2017; trans. 2020) by the Palestinian author Adania Shibli; the hybrid text The Surrendered (2015; trans. 2021) by the Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero; and The House of Small Cubes (2008), an animated short film created by the Japanese artist Kunio Katō that visualizes different ‘levels’ of the past from the perspective of an ever-smaller house flooded and altered by rising water. These are the first three works that come to my mind today.

Looking ahead, what are some directions you hope to explore in your future research?

As you can see from the above, I’m incurably attracted to big questions… This often gets me into trouble because I’m faced by ‘hyperobjects’ that are difficult to manage. I think that researchers situate themselves in a spectrum that goes from the ‘woodworm’ type, who finds a piece of timber and excavates it to the bottom, to the ‘monkey’ type, who swings from branch to branch. My research situates me very close to the ’monkey’ pole: it tends to develop horizontally and comparatively, rather than vertically.

One of the questions I would like to work on in the future is that of global responsibility. This is a continuation of a project that I started during my Leverhulme fellowship. How can contemporary literature help us clarify and bring into focus the evasive notion of ‘global responsibility’? How can literature address the representational challenges posed by forms of violence and injustice whose causes are dispersed, incremental, and relatively invisible? How much can we stretch the idea of responsibility – a concept that has its root meaning in response, and a practice that involves political literacy, critical awareness, and situated thinking? How can we develop a notion of responsibility that accounts for complex causality without losing political traction?

These are the key questions that I would like to address. In particular, I want to dig a bit deeper in a dilemma: in our interconnected world, this expansive notion of responsibility seems simultaneously necessary and impossible, or at least extremely hard to achieve. As in my other projects, I will try to offer some thoughts on this dilemma by thinking it through literature.

Photo credit: fotomovimiento.org

Another project I would like to develop in the future is temporarily called ‘Belonging and Not Belonging: Places, Identity, and Imagination.’ A few years ago, I organized a panel on this subject, and I saw that there is lots of interest in this question. What does it mean to belong to a place? In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote: ‘It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.’ The ideas of ethnonationalism, nativism, and ‘[my country] first’ have steadily spread in recent years. But we rarely stop to consider that we didn’t do anything to be American, British, French, white, black, or whatever. It simply happened to us. In fact, the only people who do something to become naturalized citizens are migrants (when they are allowed to, that is).

Can we reconceptualize the link between chance and belonging so that it becomes a tool to dislodge ethnonationalism? How can we construct a healthy concept of belonging that fosters justice and inclusion? This also involves pondering the multiple facets of non-belonging, without romanticizing it.

Finally, what does being at Ghent University in general, and being part of CMSI in particular, mean to you?

Ghent University has established itself as a global hub for the study of cultural memory, and CMSI plays an important role in this. Moreover, the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University produces cutting-edge research in environmental humanities and narratology, among other fields. Intersecting these three research areas offers opportunities to open new lines of research in memory studies. A demonstration of this are the seminars and events organized by CMSI, which create excellent opportunities to explore and discuss new approaches in the expanding field of memory studies. For example, on 13 May 2025, there will be a public lecture by Alexis Shotwell on ‘The Social Organization of Forgetting, AIDS Activism, and Resistant Relational Remembering,’ which will help us think about the contemporary potentials of memory activism.

Being at Ghent University and being part of CMSI have enabled me to keep abreast of new ideas and developments in the field of memory studies, as well as to meet or collaborate with fantastic scholars from whom I have much to learn. Last December, for example, I participated in a symposium organized by Stef Craps and Marco Caracciolo entitled ‘Imagining Environmental Futures,’ which was extremely useful for my project on literature and political imagination. And the journal Italian Culture recently published a special issue entitled ‘Italian Amnesias: Multidimensional Forgetting in Contemporary Italy,’ which I co-edited with Guido Bartolini, another member of CMSI and of Ghent University’s Department of Literary Studies.

Besides the scholarly opportunities and the stimulating environment that the university provides, I also think that Ghent and all the people I met through CMSI and the Department of Literary Studies, the meetings of the organizing team for the 2025 Mnemonics summer school, and other experiences are leaving an important mark in my own personal memory. Next academic year I will move to Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, but I will always remember Ghent University as a place that welcomed me with open arms and stimulated my work in multiple ways, and I hope to be able to continue to build new memories with the university and CMSI in the years to come.

Interview conducted via email by Stef Craps.