Romance Studies

How did Blackness become an object of curiosity, desire and fascination? How did it become exotic? In this course, we will see that this is not the result of a recent development in the representation of Black Bodies. Rather the construction of Blackness as exotic/erotic originates as far as the beginnings of colonialism. We will look at how and why black bodies have been sexualized and commodified through literary and media representation. We will then turn to works by Black intellectuals and writers who analyze and resist this form of cultural consumption. Students will critically address these issues and demonstrate their knowledge of the material through close readings and essays writing.

My dissertation, entitled " How to Occupy the Real: Postcolonial Literatures Beyond Representation " examines the potential for political subversion contained in experimental literary works by postcolonial authors like Frankétienne, examines the ways in which postcolonial authors respond to the historical exclusion from the Western Symbolic that affected and continues to affect colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. How is it possible, from the perspective of the colonized (non)subject, to express a (post)colonial experience? Is it possible to bear witness to past colonial events when the constitution of the paradigm of modernity itself necessitated the erasure of such events? Is bearing witness to past colonial events possible when the constitution of the modern paradigm itself necessitated the erasure of such events? How does one project a voice that bears the possibility to be heard when the structural stability of language and communication—in other words, the " symbolic " —is secured by deafness to these voices?

Taylorist breastfeeding constitutes a distinctly Italian phenomenon. The ideal rationalist clinics staged in the propaganda film Alle madri d’Italia (To the Mothers of Italy) serve to naturalize a factory-like vision of women’s healthcare by casting breastfeeding and childbirth as forms of mass production belonging to the state. At this nexus of medical and design history, state imperatives combined pieces of preexisting gender roles from mass media, the Catholic Church, and medical literature to create a new model for industrial motherhood. In doing so, however, the regime implicitly endorsed women’s labor in the public sphere, which had the ultimate effect of undermining its own promotion of socially conservative gender roles.

This article investigates how the mondine negotiated state demands for female bodies to both feed and populate the nation during Italy's Fascist period. Using testimonials and work songs, I rely on the mondine's own words to chronicle their lived experience of field work and the resulting spirit of rebellion that echoed across the rice paddies. I then frame these narratives against the propaganda that attempted to cast the mondina as a symbol of productive Fascist womanhood. By emphasizing women workers' accounts of their bodily revolt from labor strikes to inducing abortion, I reveal how the mondine sang truth to Fascist power.

Under Mussolini's dictatorship, both the physical abuses of a misogynist state and the political power of female friendship were written in the sensory details of agricultural workers' everyday lives. This article uses archival and melodic evidence from the sensorial world of interwar Italy to explore four interlinked case studies, ultimately revealing what is at stake in women's work songs. First, written testimonials and transcriptions from oral interviews show that, for many mondine, as the women workers in the rice paddies were called, their first moment of class consciousness occurred in transit. In train cars and depots, rice weeders came to understand their bodies as under reform by their migrant agricultural work. Upon arrival in the rice paddies, they gathered straw for mattresses to sleep in horse stables. Next, anger and resistance bloomed through work songs that privileged communal, turn-taking formats. It was a way to practice for alternative styles of rule. Finally, with songs like "The Union" ("La Lega"), women articulated their vision of the future: through battle hymns like this, they would raise the flags of Socialism and Communism. By swelling the union ranks, women vowed to bring about an egalitarian future in direct defiance of Fascism's autocratic rule.

Under Italian Fascism, film directors used East African marketplaces as backdrops to construct racist depictions of blackness.  Borrowing the then-new term for illicit commerce, they called these spaces "black markets." 

This article investigates East African marketplace films to trace the developmental arc and varieties of Italian Fascist racism in empire.  Totalling over 70 in number, these bantam adventures in souks and bazaars were among the most popular formats for 1930s newsreels purporting to document daily life in the colonies. The short documentary-style films were produced by LUCE, the cinematic arm for state-run propagandistic projects. Like many of the films produced by this larger cinematic body, marketplace newsreels cast Italian technology in starring roles. Tractors and sewing machines frame Italian as modernizing heroes. By focusing on visual and acoustic examples, the article examines the markets of propaganda through a sensory focus. Ultimately, this approach intertwines two modes of inquiry: the history of East African architecture and urbanism, and Fascist Italian empire film.