Punk Rock on the Gothic Line: Resounding the World War II Antifascist Resistenza in Contemporary Italy

The punk-rock band Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti (CSI) exemplifies a wider movement of musical memorialization of the World War II antifascist Resistenza in contemporary Italy. Considering music as communicative medium, affective experience and social practice hatched within networks of engaged citizenship, I probe its contribution to public debates about the Resistenza since the 1990s until today. Perspectives from memory studies, art history, critical historiography, and political philosophy assist me in elucidating through CSI’s example how antifascist memories are creatively reformulated and reinterpreted in Italian popular music, such that the Resistenza comes to animate an interrogation of present inequalities and emancipatory struggles