Who gets to teach the past? Colonial narratives, pedagogical authority, and platformized vernacular memories

This exploratory article examines how Italian colonialism is narrated through short-form vernaculars on TikTok and argues that these narratives intervene in public memory and identity formation by making visible what has been institutionally stabilized, downplayed, or left unsaid in Italy’s dominant historical grammars. Situating the Italian case within the broader European imperial project and its afterlives, the article links contemporary platform discourse to longer trajectories of selective remembrance and to the marginalization of colonialism in educational transmission. Methodologically, it draws on a qualitative content analysis of forty TikTok videos to reconstruct the interpretive repertoires through which the nexus between colonialism and schooling becomes speakable in everyday digital publics. Two recurrent tendencies structure this contested field: first, a critical current that challenges curricular silences and the sanitization of colonial violence in school teaching and public institutions, thereby questioning the pedagogical authority of Italian educational systems; and second, an ongoing symbolic struggle over the cultural and historical borders that define Italian identity. The article argues that short-form platforms operate as arenas of mnemonic dispute in which historical authority, national identity, and educational legitimacy are negotiated in real time. Tracing how critique and denial circulate within the same media ecology shows how platformed publics reshape understandings of Italian colonial pasts and their contemporary ramifications.