Briganti pret-a-porter: media, narrazioni e identità nel XXI secolo

Il boom delle narrazioni del passato mediatizzate è il fenomeno principale con cui la storia, la scuola e la didattica devono misurarsi oggi. Il saggio riflette sui mutamenti intervenuti nelle forme di narrazione storica, come esito di un duplice ordine di fenomeni: la riconfigurazione delle forme della comunicazione sociale e i suoi effetti sulle strategie narrative (storytelling); la riconfigurazione delle identità collettive e individuali su scala planetaria nell'ambito dei processi di globalizzazione. In questo contesto si spiega il nuovo stile populista assunto dalle forme recenti di popular history, in particolare dal «suddismo» neoborbonico con i suoi eroi-briganti, personificazione stessa delle transizioni identitarie attuali.

The boom in media-based narratives of the past is the main phenomenon with which history, school and teaching must compete today. The narratives about the brigands, in this context, constitute a significant case study, which refers to the complex dynamics that cross popular culture and historical culture in the contemporary age. The industrialization and urbanization processes, the growing importance of cultural industry and mass media, the definitive consolidation of the modern nation-state as a form of politics, already produced during the nineteenth century a general rearrangement of popular narrative universes. In order to understand the recent success of the "hero-brigand", it is necessary to include it in the continuous reframing of popular historical narratives between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The essay retraces the changes in the historical narration forms, as a result of a double order of phenomena: the reconfiguration of the forms of social communication and its effects on narrative strategies (storytelling); the reconfiguration of collective and individual identities on a planetary scale in the context of globalization processes. Some hypotheses are being put forward to explain the transversal success of the brigand-hero, a new prêt-à-porter myth, the very personification of current identity transitions.