The contested nature of heritage and the dilemmas of building cultural citizenship: the case of Italy

This chapter considers the contested nature of cultural heritage and public memory in the context of two earthquake-hit cities, L’Aquila and Naples. It reflects upon how the underlying differences that are constitutive of the politics of heritage and memory become exposed in the event of a disaster and how disparate understandings and uses of heritage at the same time call into question the grandiloquent posturing of public intellectuals who view the architectural patrimony of Italy’s historic centres as a cornerstone to cultivating a national cultural citizenship. Drawing on Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism, it is argued that if cultural heritage is to be effectively mobilized to counter undesirable reconstruction programmes or to resist the threat of speculation and evictions in historic centres, attention needs to be continually paid to its conceptual limits and internal differences otherwise heritage risks becoming the basis for an exclusionary and remonstrative vision of citizenship.