Cultural exclusion and frontier zones

Volume 67

The functioning of cultural memory is always accompanied by the emergence of suppression zones covering the experiences and phenomena which were excluded, for some reason or another, from conventional cultural practices. The scope of excluded phenomena is as broad as possible and reaches from inconvenient events, works of art, historical or cultural figures to certain forms of expression, gestures, emotions, material objects, attitudes, discourse frameworks and narration patterns. Being repressed as they are, they, however, still influence the drawing of cultural borderlines and the processes of identity construction. Such dialectics of repression and (re-) actualization can be best characterized through the notion of “cultural exclusion zones” (similar to Chernobyl exclusion zone). In the current issue of “Rivista di Estetica” we thus try to discover and to describe those exclusion zones, the mechanisms of their formation and their multifold impact upon the contents of culture in different social, historical, epistemological and cultural contexts.