This article focuses on Enrico Brizzi's L'inattesa piega degli eventi The Unexpected Turn of Events, 2008, La nostra guerra Our War, 2009, and Lorenzo Pellegrini e le donne Lorenzo Pellegrini and the ...Women, 2012, a trilogy of alternative history novels that imagine what would have happened to the Italian empire if Italy had not allied with Germany during World War II. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's reflections on contemporaneity, I analyze how this trilogy represents Fascism and its colonial legacy in relation to the history of politics and soccer in Italy. I also compare Brizzi's trilogy to Mario Farneti's alternative history novels—Occidente Occident, 2001, Attacco all'Occidente Attack on the Occident, 2005, and Nuovo impero d'Occidente New Empire of the Occident, 2006—which propose a celebratory rather than mocking depiction of Fascism and its imperialist agenda. This reading is useful for understanding Brizzi's interpretation of Italian political history after World War II and his attempt to use sf, a literary genre that was important for the promotion of the Italian colonial enterprise, to decolonize the Italian imagination. I argue that Brizzi's and Farneti's different visions of Italy's alternative past embody what John Foot has termed “Italy's divided memory” and its constitutive ambivalence regarding the legacy of Fascism.
This article draws on Mieke Bal's reflections about the use of the documentary film as a way to explore migration cultures from a scholarly perspective, and it chronicles the production of Maka ...(2022), a film about Geneviève Makaping's life and thoughts on race and belonging. It focuses on the collaboration and dialogue with Makaping and director Elia Moutamid, among other members of the creative team, and it argues that collaboration and dialogue can have an impact beyond the academic context. Indeed, Maka is a hybrid work that blends theory and biographical storytelling, and it is therefore accessible to a larger audience. Documentaries involve self-reflective practices which might be useful to interrogate our position throughout the research process and to reflect upon the ethical questions which are involved in scholarly work about migration cultures.
The article argues that Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero luminoso (2016) and Giuliano Santoro’s Su due piedi. Camminando per un mese attraverso la Calabria (2012) describe walking as an activity which allows ...one to recognize the social modifications of space, and to rethink the geographies of suburban areas in Italy. This analysis resounds with Robert P. Marzec’s invitation to study how literature has represented the privatization and the capitalist and neoliberal organization of space, revealing forms of internal colonization which epitomize a pillar of colonial ideology. Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi reconfigure walking as an epistemological, ecocritical and postcolonial practice which allows one to cross paths with people who are marginalized in Italy, especially migrants. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s and David Pinder’s reflections about space and representation, the article suggests that Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi show how the direct experience of a place through walking is germane to understanding the effects of economic exploitation present in human-land relations.
The article analyzes Beyond the Frame (Oltre i bordi, 2023), a film based on Simone Brioni's fortuitous discovery of a family archive: a box of photographs taken in Italian East Africa in the 1930s ...by a distant relative. Beyond the Frame discusses colonial photography and visuality, as well as the material legacies of that past, challenging the gaze through which they framed the subjective and collective idea of Africa in Italian society. The article is divided into two parts, each of which discusses colonial photography and how Beyond the Frame observes, interprets, and reflects on how the legacy of colonialism shapes our present. In the first part, Brioni traces the process that led to the construction of a narrative that interweaves personal reflections and collective history. In the second part, Gianmarco Mancosu draws upon Ann Laura Stoler's work to discuss how the colonial archive and the remains of empire fashion our present, with a particular emphasis on photography and on colonial traces in the Italian cityscape. The article shows how the film works with as well as against the archive: how it enacts a process of resignification, thus modifying the original meaning of colonial pictures.
Drawing on Michel Foucault's definition of heterotopia, the article analyses the filmic and literary representation of Stazione Termini, Rome's main train station. The Fascist architectural project, ...which mirrors an idea of the nation as homogeneous, monolithic, and white, begins to be challenged in the post-World War II representations of Termini which depict the station as the place where liminal and unexpected experiences can occur and accepted moral codes of behaviour are put into question. The article then focuses on the recent representation of Termini as a key place of contact with and among immigrants. While migration literature describes the station as a place of belonging, other contemporary representations of Termini depict it as a non-place, revealing the fear of a globalised world. The representation of Termini either as an isolated place in the urban geography of Rome or as a place that mirrors the multicultural reality of present-day Italy highlights a tension between different ways of practicing the same space.
In un articolo del 2014, “Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies”, pubblicato sull’influente rivista Italian Studies, Emma Bond segnalava una svolta transnazionale nello studio delle ...letterature nazionali, discutendo alcuni degli studi più importanti realizzati sull’argomento in Italia o nell’ambito dell’Italianistica. Tale svolta, secondo l’autrice, sarebbe stata necessaria per meglio comprendere e rappresentare le identità fluide e transnazionali e le appartenenze multiple che caratterizzano il mondo globalizzato in cui viviamo. In particolare, Bond identificava nella corporeità uno spazio privilegiato per comprendere tali traiettorie transnazionali.
This article aims to contribute to the debate about critical race studies in the Italian context - and especially in the 1960s and the 1970s - by focusing on the construction and negotiation of race ...in the career of the prominent Italian meticcia singer, television host and producer Silvana Areggasc Savorelli, also known as Tanya from 1960 to 1966 and Lara Saint Paul from 1967 onwards. Through an examination of Savorelli's career as a singer, television host and Italian diva, this article shows how the meanings of Savorelli's meticcio body have been constantly adapting to the shifting perceptions of blackness in Italy and other Western societies. Lara Saint Paul's media representations illustrate a change in the social construction of Italianness in terms of race from the early 1960s to the early 2000s.
Graziella Parati è fra le prime e più influenti studiose ad occuparsi di letteratura scritta da immigrati in lingua italiana. La sua più recente monografia, Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy: ...Proximities and Affect in Literature and Film (2017), è stata scritta a distanza di otto anni dal suo primo saggio, Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy (1999).
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