Breathing in the Dust Like Steve McQueen

Multiplying Asbestos to Turn the “I” into a “We”

Abstract

This essay examines the re-editions of Alberto Prunetti’s Amianto. Una storia operaia, an autobiographical novel recounting his father’s death from asbestos exposure in steel plants from Piombino to Casale Monferrato and Taranto, where he worked as a welder. Writing from a second-generation working-class perspective, Prunetti seeks both to “avenge the father” and to narrate history from within the class itself.
By analysing the book’s reception and its editorial reworkings with different publishers (Agenzia X, Alegre), the essay explores how the recirculation of the same narrative becomes an act of denunciation oriented toward a “memory for the future.” Particular attention is given to the chapter Come Steve McQueen, added in the Alegre edition, which marks a shift toward the construction of a collective imagination. Through successive rewritings of the Western episode, the comparative “come” (“like”) evolves into a performative “noi” (“we”) and ultimately into an affiliative “co-” of working-class co-creation. A comparative and transmedial reading of the photographs in Come Steve McQueen highlights literature’s performative capacity to generate repertoires of action and to forge new links between memory and activism.