- CRISTINA LOMBARDI-DIOP is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Italian Studies Program in the... moreCRISTINA LOMBARDI-DIOP is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Italian Studies Program in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department of Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on African literature, Italian cultural history, and gender and migration. She earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. She is editor, with Caterina Romeo, of Postcolonial Italy (2012) (published in Italian as L’Italia postcoloniale) and author, with Gaia Giuliani, of Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (2013). Founder and director of the publishing series Transiti, for Le Monnier Mondadori, Cristina has published widely on white colonial femininity; the Black Atlantic and the Mediterranean; African cultural spaces, and African diasporic literature in Italy. She is the editor and translator of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Moving the Center (2000) of Italo-Ethiopian writer Gabriella Ghermandi’s novel Queen of Flowers and Pearls (2007) and of two journal special issues, one on Postcolonial Europe (2016) and the other on Afrofuturismo: Spazi, corpi, estetiche, pensiero dell’afrotopia (2019). Her article “Filial Descent: The African Roots of Italian Postcolonial Literature” appeared in The Forum for Modern Language Studies (2020). As a member of the Black Mediterranean Collective, she prefaced the edited volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (2021). Her study of the Italian reception of Langston Hughes’ poetry was included in the Cambridge University Press series on Langston Hughes in Context (2023). She is currently working on a book project on the entangled legacies of antisemitism and anti-blackness in Fascist and post-Fascist Italy.edit
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My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant... more
My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant mobility. It is my contention that the discipline, in its institutional discourse and material practices has promoted their relevance unevenly, and I will explain why and to what effects. I contend that these two critical perspectives, while they have been theorized by a great variety of scholars in Italy and across continental Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States, have not reached an equal status as legitimate fields within Italian studies. There are many points of convergence between these two approaches, yet I want to emphasize the imbalance of power in the dissemination of knowledge and institutional visibility of these two critical methods, an imbalance that is not simply epistemic but involves a disparity in the allocation of institutional resources and money, in the existence of publishing venues, and in the creation of scholarships and of academic positions.
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In the wake of the historic election of the first black president of the United States, the ex-prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, in greeting the event, made an uncanny remark that shocked the world. Smilingly, he referred to... more
In the wake of the historic election of the first black president of the United States, the ex-prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, in greeting the event, made an uncanny remark that shocked the world. Smilingly, he referred to Barack Obama as “young, handsome, and also tanned.”1 Berlusconi’s ambiguous reference to Obama’s racial identity was intended as a humorous compliment, he later explained. In his view the remark, which derided Obama’s racial identity in an attempt to erase it, was indeed comical since it supposedly revealed that the power of the state cannot possibly be embodied in a black body which, by definition, the state power seeks to exclude. Consequently, Berlusconi reduced Obama’s blackness to a cosmetic trick—a blackened face, a burned face, a form of whiteness in disguise, a tan, something to be laughed at.
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This chapter attempts a redefinition of models of female subjectivity under fascism through an investigation of autobiographical and fictional works written in the 1930s by Italian women who traveled to colonial Africa. It is divided in... more
This chapter attempts a redefinition of models of female subjectivity under fascism through an investigation of autobiographical and fictional works written in the 1930s by Italian women who traveled to colonial Africa. It is divided in three parts, dedicated to Anna Messina’s Cronache del Nilo (Nile Chronicles) (1940), Augusta Perricone-Viola’s Donne e non bambole (Women, Not Dolls) (1930), and Alba Felter Sartori’s Vagabondaggi, soste, avventure negli albori dell’impero (Wanderings, Halts, and Adventures at the Dawning of the Empire) (1940), respectively. The texts I include in my analysis significantly challenge critical readings of both male-authored colonial writings and female subjectivity under the regime by complicating critical paradigms of fascist metropolitan models of femininity. I claim that fascist colonial writings by Italian women display a model of European female subjectivity that is racially and class specific. Moreover, these texts enlist and are complicit with different dominant colonial discourses, such as the cultural and technological superiority of Western modernity and a belated form of Orientalism, peculiar to Italy’s belated colonial enterprise.1
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... “Creating the vertical village: Senegalese traditions of immigration and transnational cultural life”. In The New African Diaspora in North America: Trends, Community Building, and Adaptation , Edited by: Konadu-Agyemang, K., Takyi,... more
... “Creating the vertical village: Senegalese traditions of immigration and transnational cultural life”. In The New African Diaspora in North America: Trends, Community Building, and Adaptation , Edited by: Konadu-Agyemang, K., Takyi, BK and Arthur, J. 96–106. ...
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My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant... more
My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant mobility. It is my contention that the discipline, in its institutional discourse and material practices has promoted their relevance unevenly, and I will explain why and to what effects. I contend that these two critical perspectives, while they have been theorized by a great variety of scholars in Italy and across continental Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States, have not reached an equal status as legitimate fields within Italian studies. There are many points of convergence between these two approaches, yet I want to emphasize the imbalance of power in the dissemination of knowledge and institutional visibility of these two critical methods, an imbalance that is not simply epistemic but involves a disparity in the allocation of institutional resources and money, in the existence of publishing venues, and in the creation of scholarships and of academic positions.
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L’afrofuturismo è una macchina del tempo in fuga dal presente che dal passato apre visioni di futuri possibili, di mondi a venire. Nel panorama culturale nero contemporaneo, l’afrofuturismo si pone come uno dei campi di esplorazione... more
L’afrofuturismo è una macchina del tempo in fuga dal presente che dal passato apre visioni di futuri possibili, di mondi a venire. Nel panorama culturale nero contemporaneo, l’afrofuturismo si pone come uno dei campi di esplorazione estetica e politica più promettenti del nuovo millennio. A dar voce a questa nuova centralità dell’Africa sono oggi gli artisti e i filosofi del continente africano e delle sue diaspore.
Il numero tematico di Roots&Routes propone l’afrofuturismo come sensibilità estetica e strumento politico che riconnette la sensibilità diasporica nera americana alle sue radici afrocentriche e alle sue ramificazioni nel Mediterraneo nero e in Europa. Nell’affrontare temi che investono il rapporto tra spazialità, temporalità, estetica, embodiment, tecno-cultura, nuove epistemologie situate e decentrate, neo e post colonialità, cultura di massa, e fantascienza, il numero di Roots&Routes sollecita ricerche unite da un interesse comune per un’estetica e una pratica culturale e politica derivante da esperienze afrodiscendenti e afrodiasporiche proiettate verso l’afrotopia.
Il numero tematico di Roots&Routes propone l’afrofuturismo come sensibilità estetica e strumento politico che riconnette la sensibilità diasporica nera americana alle sue radici afrocentriche e alle sue ramificazioni nel Mediterraneo nero e in Europa. Nell’affrontare temi che investono il rapporto tra spazialità, temporalità, estetica, embodiment, tecno-cultura, nuove epistemologie situate e decentrate, neo e post colonialità, cultura di massa, e fantascienza, il numero di Roots&Routes sollecita ricerche unite da un interesse comune per un’estetica e una pratica culturale e politica derivante da esperienze afrodiscendenti e afrodiasporiche proiettate verso l’afrotopia.
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Per parlare di violenza di genere e di violenza razziale, il saggio parte da una serie di spunti culturali e storico-ideologici del primo Novecento, tipici di un certo sentire culturale, ma le cui ramificazioni sembrano persistere... more
Per parlare di violenza di genere e di violenza razziale, il saggio parte da una serie di spunti culturali e storico-ideologici del primo Novecento, tipici di un certo sentire culturale, ma le cui ramificazioni sembrano persistere tuttora. Concentrandosi sull’estetica marinettiana, si cerca di capire come l’articolazione della violenza razziale e della misoginia abbiano fatto del futurismo il primo (e il più importante) movimento d’avanguardia in Italia. Nell’avanguardia futurista il discorso razziale sostiene tutta una serie di forme esteticizzanti della soggettività che inaugurano una nuova concezione della modernità e della cittadinanza politica. La retorica della violenza, e la violenza stessa, regola la disciplina dei corpi bianchi e dei corpi neri e li inquadra nella modernità assoggettandoli alla politica dell’espansione del capitale razziale. Il soggetto maschile, in quanto bianco e quindi europeo/italiano, si nutre del corpo nero nel momento in cui proclama la propria rinascita in nome della modernità.
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The essay concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers... more
The essay concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers and Pearls). It argues that these works give expression to an African diasporic urban generation that is changing the literary legacy of the Horn of Africa. The co-presence of multiple genres, with orality appearing as a strong influence on their written narrative forms, places these novels within the larger formation of a black African literary tradition. By looking at these two novels from an Africanist perspective, the essay takes into consideration their plurilingual interventions, the use of glossaries and linguistic borrowings, alongside the presence of Somali and Amharic cultural references. It highlights the authorial perspective as a ‘filial descent’ that addresses the complexity of a postcolonial generational shift in contemporary African literature. By placing these works within an African literary tradition and showing their critical de-centring of this tradition, the essay reconfigures a possible space of cultural autonomy for African postcolonial writing, away from the Italocentric space of discourse that has so far dominated its critical reception in Italy.
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The essay considers the material life of a colonial city, such as Asmara, and a postcolonial city, such as Rome, in order to explore how material and immaterial elements, such spatial and labor relations, racial segregation, and white... more
The essay considers the material life of a colonial city, such as Asmara, and a postcolonial city, such as Rome, in order to explore how material and immaterial elements, such spatial and labor relations, racial segregation, and white privilege were transformed over time, constituting an open archive of memory and identity. The chapter opens with a general overview of how the colonial legacy in today’s postcolonial time is inescapably linked with the urban landscapes of Eritrean immigration in Italy. It then moves to consider the 'postcolonial archeology' of works engaged in bringing back the past. Such works (Bianchi, Sgego, Sibhatu, Brioni) examine Italian contemporary capitals, and especially Rome – as cities that could be understood as living colonial archives. The essay also draws from literary works (Dell’Oro, Manfredi), in order to comment on the changing patterns of racial, gender and class relations from Asmara to Rome. In closing, the chapter argues that the axis Rome-Asmara becomes the site for the elaboration of a particular kind of Italian postcolonial archeology – one where the issues of white privilege, class, sexual, and labor relations, as well as racial segregation, remain open and often unaddressed.
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Italy, like other European countries, reckons today with its sense of cultural roots within a unified Europe. Current re-examinations of its postcolonial national identity can be seen as a reaction to the fast-paced demographic changes... more
Italy, like other European countries, reckons today with its sense of cultural roots within a unified Europe. Current re-examinations of its postcolonial national identity can be seen as a reaction to the fast-paced demographic changes brought about by immigration and globalisation. This is true also for the other European countries. In what follows, we examine what constitutes the postcolonial condition of contemporary Italy and place such condition within a larger European postcolonial
framework. By tracing the specificities of the geopolitical dislocation of Italy as a Southern European country, we argue that the paradigm emerging from this national case contributes to redefining the notion of a ‘European’ postcolonial as a whole. To this aim, we identify lines of continuity that connect Italy to other European countries, such as colonial history—‘projected as Europe’s externality’ —as well as a colonial legacy that deeply affected the formation of national
identities across Europe and still impinges upon its contemporary social landscape. Contemporary transnational migrations—which are the consequences of the disparities that the colonial system has created around the world—are at the core of both Italian and European postcolonialities, since the presence of migrants and postcolonial subjects on European soil reactivates memories, fantasies, and
imaginaries related to that legacy. They also reinstate relationships of power created by colonialism—such as processes of racialisation and racism, for instance—which are reproduced and reinforced in contemporary postcolonial societies to defend a white, Christian, European identity.
framework. By tracing the specificities of the geopolitical dislocation of Italy as a Southern European country, we argue that the paradigm emerging from this national case contributes to redefining the notion of a ‘European’ postcolonial as a whole. To this aim, we identify lines of continuity that connect Italy to other European countries, such as colonial history—‘projected as Europe’s externality’ —as well as a colonial legacy that deeply affected the formation of national
identities across Europe and still impinges upon its contemporary social landscape. Contemporary transnational migrations—which are the consequences of the disparities that the colonial system has created around the world—are at the core of both Italian and European postcolonialities, since the presence of migrants and postcolonial subjects on European soil reactivates memories, fantasies, and
imaginaries related to that legacy. They also reinstate relationships of power created by colonialism—such as processes of racialisation and racism, for instance—which are reproduced and reinforced in contemporary postcolonial societies to defend a white, Christian, European identity.
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This special issue brings together the interventions of a number of scholars from different European countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark) where postcolonial theory has been produced outside... more
This special issue brings together the interventions of a number of scholars from different European countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark) where postcolonial theory has been produced outside the ‘mainstream’ of postcolonial studies—geopolitically represented by Great Britain, France, and, to a certain extent, the Netherlands. The collection thus scrutinizes how ‘peripheral’ perspectives on the postcolonial reshape and revitalize the postcolonial paradigm as a whole. By this we do not mean to suggest that the colonial histories of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands are the same or that they have produced the same effects. Nor do we imply that all the countries we include in this special issue are postcolonial in the same way, or that they adopt the same paradigm of postcoloniality; quite the opposite, in fact. Our methodology aims at identifying lines of continuity among different national cases that may help define a European postcoloniality, while simultaneously tracing lines of discontinuity that may bring to focus the specific postcoloniality of the national cases under consideration. With this intent in mind, each essay included in Postcolonial Europe presents the colonial history of one national case, while also examining how other specific historical events and social phenomena, at a European level, have historically contributed to the shaping of that country’s national identity. Many of the contributors in the volume also explore issues of colonial memory and legacy, tracing trajectories among different postcolonialities in the present, mainly interrogating issues of subalternity, dynamics of empires within and without Europe, processes of racialization, and the impact in today’s European societies of transnational immigrants, many (but not all) of whom are descendants of ex-colonial subjects.
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My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant... more
My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant mobility. It is my contention that the discipline, in its institutional discourse and material practices has promoted their relevance unevenly, and I will explain why and to what effects. I contend that these two critical perspectives, while they have been theorized by a great variety of scholars in Italy and across continental Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States, have not reached an equal status as legitimate fields within Italian studies. There are many points of convergence between these two approaches, yet I want to emphasize the imbalance of power in the dissemination of knowledge and institutional visibility of these two critical methods, an imbalance that is not simply epistemic but involves a disparity in the allocation of institutional resources and money, in the existence of publishing venues, and in the creation of scholarships and of academic positions.
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My paper investigates questions of temporality in relation to antiquity and modernity and in the context of Fascist imperial fantasies. In particular, it considers Gabriele D’Annunzio’s drama Più che l’amore (1906) in relation to two... more
My paper investigates questions of temporality in relation to antiquity and modernity and in the context of Fascist imperial fantasies. In particular, it considers Gabriele D’Annunzio’s drama Più che l’amore (1906) in relation to two travel narratives, Nella Orano’s Le vigili ombre del passato (1930) and Alba Sartori Felter’s Vagabondaggi, soste, avventure negli albori dell’impero (1940).
The first work chronicles the author’s travels through Libya. The second work follows the author in her wanderings across Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1930s. Orano’s and Ferter’s texts mark the emergence of Italian womanhood as an important signifier for articulating colonial hierarchies of gender and race and the fascistization of colonial discourse. All three texts deal with the question of time and the classical past, but in very different ways. D’Annunzio’s mystic nationalism establishes a link to imperial Rome and the central role (and failure) of masculinity in the transformation of colonial Africa from a textual reference to a military project. Felter posits imperialism as a temporal tabula rasa, where technology, modernity, and autarky are the only way forward. Orano ponders on ruins and the classical past, a time already without future, or a time confined to the timeless “immortal glory” of ancient Rome. In place of an exotic other, Orano opposes a classicist aesthetics and the ruins of Roman Libya. Yet, ironically, the ruins are a phantasmagorical threat to the imperial fantasy, where local resistance hides among the African remnants of ancient Rome. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the rhetorical aporia of Italian imperialism as a project both old and new, stuck between classicism and the exotic, where the question of temporality takes the form of heterogeneous literary genres and provides a smoking mirror amid the threat of the Libyan resistance, military violence, and patriarchal norms.
The first work chronicles the author’s travels through Libya. The second work follows the author in her wanderings across Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1930s. Orano’s and Ferter’s texts mark the emergence of Italian womanhood as an important signifier for articulating colonial hierarchies of gender and race and the fascistization of colonial discourse. All three texts deal with the question of time and the classical past, but in very different ways. D’Annunzio’s mystic nationalism establishes a link to imperial Rome and the central role (and failure) of masculinity in the transformation of colonial Africa from a textual reference to a military project. Felter posits imperialism as a temporal tabula rasa, where technology, modernity, and autarky are the only way forward. Orano ponders on ruins and the classical past, a time already without future, or a time confined to the timeless “immortal glory” of ancient Rome. In place of an exotic other, Orano opposes a classicist aesthetics and the ruins of Roman Libya. Yet, ironically, the ruins are a phantasmagorical threat to the imperial fantasy, where local resistance hides among the African remnants of ancient Rome. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the rhetorical aporia of Italian imperialism as a project both old and new, stuck between classicism and the exotic, where the question of temporality takes the form of heterogeneous literary genres and provides a smoking mirror amid the threat of the Libyan resistance, military violence, and patriarchal norms.
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Beyond Italy: reflections on the present and the future of the postcolonial Italy, like other European countries, has undergone an epochal transformation as a postcolonial country in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and as a... more
Beyond Italy: reflections on the present and the future of the postcolonial Italy, like other European countries, has undergone an epochal transformation as a postcolonial country in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and as a consequence of the demographic and social changes brought about by mass immigration from the global South. Similarly to most European countries, postcolonial studies applied to the Italian context repositions colonial history and its legacy at the center of the debate on contemporaneity and connects them to transnational immigrations. The historical examination of the Italian past, however, unlike that of other European countries, necessarily includes mass emigration (and, in more than one sense, emigrants as colonized subjects) and the Southern Question (as internal colonialism ). The essay builds an historical and theoretical framework in order to interrogate what constitutes the postcolonial condition of contemporary Italy. It surveys an array of conco...
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In the late summer and early fall of 1924, Langston Hughes spent nearly two months traveling through Italy. He first stopped in the small village of Desenzano, on the shores of Lake Garda, before heading to Verona and Venice.... more
In the late summer and early fall of 1924, Langston Hughes spent nearly two months traveling through Italy. He first stopped in the small village of Desenzano, on the shores of Lake Garda, before heading to Verona and Venice. Unfortunately, what began as a summer holiday ended as an eventful escape from hunger, dispossession, and the physical violence of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Jim Crow laws prevented Hughes from being hired as crew on ships headed back to the United States, leaving him stranded as a beachcomber on the shores of Genoa. The talk first examines the literary persona that emerges from the Italian translation of Langston Hughes' s poetry of the late 1940s and 1950s, a time when he first received noteworthy attention in Italy. It then turns to Hughes’s life experience in Italy. While the translations create an ambiguous framing that makes Hughes’ Blackness either obscurely picturesque, or altogether invisible, the talk will consider how Hughes’s own reading of Italy speaks back, retrospectively, by reframing Blackness as historically visible within the framework of the Mediterranean as a big and Black sea.
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Copertina, indice, introduzione e manifesto del volume collettaneo di ricercatori attivisti del progetto "S/Murare il Mediterraneo. Pratiche locali, nazionali e transfrontaliere di artivismo transculturale, per una poetica e... more
Copertina, indice, introduzione e manifesto del volume collettaneo di ricercatori attivisti del progetto "S/Murare il Mediterraneo. Pratiche locali, nazionali e transfrontaliere di artivismo transculturale, per una poetica e politica dell'ospitalità e mobilità".Contiene saggio "Mediterraneo liquido, Per un pensiero liquido decoloniale", di Paola Zaccaria, accessibile nella mia pagina academia, dove sono scaricati anche saggi correlati al progetto "S/MUrare il Mediterraneo/Un-walling the Mediterranean": "Erranze senza ritorni. Strade d'acqua ... liquefazione dell'appartenenza", "Gli archivi incarnati del Mediterraneo", "(Trans)MediterrAtlantic embodied shadow archives"; "MEDITERRANEAN AND TRANSATLANTIC ARTIVISM: COUNTER-ACTING NEO-COLONIALISMS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE"; "Medi-terranean Borderization, or deterritorializing Mediterranean space". ENGLISH: Cover, contents, introduction and manifesto of the volume written by the activist researchers of the project "Un/Walling the Mediterranean", Bari, 2009-16. SEE ALSO RELATED PAPERS ON UN/WALLING THE MEDITERRANEAN uploaded by Paola Zaccaria on her academia page.
Research Interests: Sociology of Culture, Translation Studies, Photography, Critical Geopolitics, Migration mobilities, and 12 moreMediterranean Studies, English as a Lingua Franca, Cultural Memory, Migration Studies, Derrida, Geocriticism, Cinema Studies, Borders and Frontiers, Artivism, Mediterranean Climate, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Filosofia della conoscenza ed Epistemologia
The essay concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers... more
The essay concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers and Pearls). It argues that these works give expression to an African diasporic urban generation that is changing the literary legacy of the Horn of Africa. The co-presence of multiple genres, with orality appearing as a strong influence on their written narrative forms, places these novels within the larger formation of a black African literary tradition. By looking at these two novels from an Africanist perspective, the essay takes into consideration their plurilingual interventions, the use of glossaries and linguistic borrowings, alongside the presence of Somali and Amharic cultural references. It highlights the authorial perspective as a ‘filial descent’ that addresses the complexity of a postcolonial generational shift in contemporary African...
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Il presente volume ricostruisce la storia politica, culturale e visiva dell’identità razziale degli italiani dal periodo unitario al boom economico, passando per il fascismo e il dopoguerra. Esso unisce la ricerca e le competenze di due... more
Il presente volume ricostruisce la storia politica, culturale e visiva dell’identità razziale degli italiani dal periodo unitario al boom economico, passando per il fascismo e il dopoguerra. Esso unisce la ricerca e le competenze di due studiose italiane di formazione diversa ma il cui sforzo congiunto esemplifica le ricche possibilità multidisciplinari degli studi sulla razza e l’identità razziale: Gaia Giuliani, utilizzando categorie analitiche derivanti dalla filosofia politica, dalla Critical Race Theory, dai Whiteness Studies e dai Postcolonial Studies, esamina le teorie politiche sul razzismo, la letteratura scientifica e la legislazione in materia di emigrazione con lo scopo di tracciare i diversi processi di auto-razzizzazione nel discorso politico dal periodo unitario fino al 1936. Cristina Lombardi-Diop, che muove dalla Critical Race Theory e dagli studi culturali, prende in considerazione le pratiche discorsive medico-scientifiche, la letteratura coloniale e l’iconografia della bianchezza legata ai consumi e alle pratiche del quotidiano allo scopo di mappare i processi di razzizzazione che, dal 1936 al 1965, si affermano nella cultura diffusa e di massa. Entrambe le sezioni del volume hanno l’intento di capire come tali costruzioni discorsive e visive trovino una loro larga diffusione nella cultura e nell’immaginario nazionale. Il volume intende così a contribuire al nascente ambito di ricerca degli studi razziali e identitari in Italia, collocando il discorso storico sull’identità razziale degli italiani in una prospettiva storiografica nazionale e transnazionale. L’intento di base del volume è quello di ribaltare l’approccio della storiografia esistente che, nell’affermare l’eccezionalità e esemplarità del caso italiano, mette a repentaglio l’emergere di un reale dibattito storico – avviato oramai da tempo in altri paesi – sull’identità razziale derivante dall’esperienza unitaria e meridionalista, da quella coloniale e dalla teorizzazione e l’applicazione del razzismo di stato nel XX secolo. La minimizzazione, che spesso sfiora il diniego, delle implicazioni etiche, politiche e storiche dei processi di razzizzazione degli italiani impedisce inoltre un vero confronto pubblico sulle ricadute e la diffusione del razzismo nella contemporaneità. A quest'ultima in particolare il volume dedica, infine, le conclusioni.
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Copertina, indice, introduzione e manifesto del volume collettaneo di ricercatori attivisti del progetto "S/Murare il Mediterraneo. Pratiche locali, nazionali e transfrontaliere di artivismo transculturale, per una poetica e politica... more
Copertina, indice, introduzione e manifesto del volume collettaneo di ricercatori attivisti del progetto "S/Murare il Mediterraneo. Pratiche locali, nazionali e transfrontaliere di artivismo transculturale, per una poetica e politica dell'ospitalità e mobilità".Contiene saggio "Mediterraneo liquido, Per un pensiero liquido decoloniale", di Paola Zaccaria, accessibile nella mia pagina academia, dove sono scaricati anche saggi correlati al progetto "S/MUrare il Mediterraneo/Un-walling the Mediterranean": "Erranze senza ritorni. Strade d'acqua ... liquefazione dell'appartenenza", "Gli archivi incarnati del Mediterraneo", "(Trans)MediterrAtlantic embodied shadow archives"; "MEDITERRANEAN AND TRANSATLANTIC ARTIVISM: COUNTER-ACTING NEO-COLONIALISMS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE"; "Medi-terranean Borderization, or deterritorializing Mediterranean space".
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Cover, contents, introduction and manifesto of the volume written by the activist researchers of the project "Un/Walling the Mediterranean", Bari, 2009-16. SEE ALSO RELATED PAPERS ON UN/WALLING THE MEDITERRANEAN uploaded by Paola Zaccaria on her academia page.
ENGLISH:
Cover, contents, introduction and manifesto of the volume written by the activist researchers of the project "Un/Walling the Mediterranean", Bari, 2009-16. SEE ALSO RELATED PAPERS ON UN/WALLING THE MEDITERRANEAN uploaded by Paola Zaccaria on her academia page.
Research Interests: Sociology of Culture, Translation Studies, Photography, Critical Geopolitics, Migration mobilities, and 12 moreMediterranean Studies, English as a Lingua Franca, Cultural Memory, Migration Studies, Derrida, Geocriticism, Cinema Studies, Borders and Frontiers, Artivism, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Filosofia della conoscenza ed Epistemologia, and S/Murare il Mediterraneo-Un/walling the Mediterranean
As this groundbreaking volume makes amply clear, the postcolonial condition is one of the most significant factors shaping culture and lived experience in Italy today. The essays gathered here, from leading international scholars in... more
As this groundbreaking volume makes amply clear, the postcolonial condition is one of the most significant factors shaping culture and lived experience in Italy today. The essays gathered here, from leading international scholars in multiple disciplines, do not limit themselves to the relationship between former colonizers and colonized, nor to a rereading of colonial history and culture. Rather, together they map the common postcolonial context in which a wide array of discourses, social practices, and forms of cultural production are challenging the notion of Italy's national homogeneity. Ranging from Italian immigration and the subalternity of the South to the postnational aesthetics of film, literature, and music, they form an indispensable resource for students and scholars in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, European Studies, Diaspora Studies, Race Theory, and a variety of other fields.
“An important contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, this volume offers wide-ranging and provocative analyses of the intricately interconnected legacies of colonialism, emigration, and global migration in Italy. Mapping a landscape of postcolonial studies that is unique to Italy in terms of its regimes of race, gender, citizenship and cultural transformations, Postcolonial Italy engenders radically new and challenging critiques of hegemonic British/Indian/USA centered formulations of postcolonial studies.”—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
“An essential book for any scholar of modern Italy, but in fact for anybody interested in the perduring effects of colonialism in today’s globalized world, Postcolonial Italy has the rare merit of casting a bold look not only at the silenced history of Italian colonialism overseas, but also at that chapter of Italy’s internal colonialism known as ‘the southern question.’ The contributions, drawing from postcolonial studies, cultural studies, race theory, and gender studies, will be of compelling interest to readers in a wide range of fields.”—Roberto Dainotto, Professor of Italian and of Literature, Duke University, USA
“This is an important collection of critical essays which engages head-on with the challenging inheritance of colonialism. Today, it is the return of this negated past in representations of race, racism and the much-maligned migrant that poses the principal political challenge of a heterogeneous, postcolonial Italy.”—Iain Chambers, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy
“An important contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, this volume offers wide-ranging and provocative analyses of the intricately interconnected legacies of colonialism, emigration, and global migration in Italy. Mapping a landscape of postcolonial studies that is unique to Italy in terms of its regimes of race, gender, citizenship and cultural transformations, Postcolonial Italy engenders radically new and challenging critiques of hegemonic British/Indian/USA centered formulations of postcolonial studies.”—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
“An essential book for any scholar of modern Italy, but in fact for anybody interested in the perduring effects of colonialism in today’s globalized world, Postcolonial Italy has the rare merit of casting a bold look not only at the silenced history of Italian colonialism overseas, but also at that chapter of Italy’s internal colonialism known as ‘the southern question.’ The contributions, drawing from postcolonial studies, cultural studies, race theory, and gender studies, will be of compelling interest to readers in a wide range of fields.”—Roberto Dainotto, Professor of Italian and of Literature, Duke University, USA
“This is an important collection of critical essays which engages head-on with the challenging inheritance of colonialism. Today, it is the return of this negated past in representations of race, racism and the much-maligned migrant that poses the principal political challenge of a heterogeneous, postcolonial Italy.”—Iain Chambers, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy
Research Interests:
Abstract The chapter concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen... more
Abstract
The chapter concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers and Pearls). It argues that these works give expression to an African diasporic urban generation that is changing the literary legacy of the Horn of Africa. The co-presence of multiple genres, with orality appearing as a strong influence on their written narrative forms, places Madre piccola and Regina di fiori e di perle within the larger formation of a black African literary tradition. By looking at these two novels from an Africanist perspective, the essay takes into consideration their plurilingual interventions, the use of glossaries and language calques, alongside the presence of Somali and Amharic cultural references. While recognizing the African specificity of the novels’ sources, the author also highlights Ali Farah’s and Ghermandi’s authorial perspective as a ‘filial descent’ that addresses the complexity of a postcolonial generational shift in contemporary African literature. The language and cultural references Ali Farah and Ghermandi conjure and reinvent are the expression of a new generation of African Italian women’s artists who, through diaspora and double descent, have moved away from the territorial univocality of both European and African national traditions. By placing these works within an African literary tradition and showing their critical de-centering of such tradition, the essay reconfigures a possible space of cultural autonomy for African postcolonial writing away from the Italocentric space of discourse that has so far dominated its critical reception in Italy.
The chapter concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers and Pearls). It argues that these works give expression to an African diasporic urban generation that is changing the literary legacy of the Horn of Africa. The co-presence of multiple genres, with orality appearing as a strong influence on their written narrative forms, places Madre piccola and Regina di fiori e di perle within the larger formation of a black African literary tradition. By looking at these two novels from an Africanist perspective, the essay takes into consideration their plurilingual interventions, the use of glossaries and language calques, alongside the presence of Somali and Amharic cultural references. While recognizing the African specificity of the novels’ sources, the author also highlights Ali Farah’s and Ghermandi’s authorial perspective as a ‘filial descent’ that addresses the complexity of a postcolonial generational shift in contemporary African literature. The language and cultural references Ali Farah and Ghermandi conjure and reinvent are the expression of a new generation of African Italian women’s artists who, through diaspora and double descent, have moved away from the territorial univocality of both European and African national traditions. By placing these works within an African literary tradition and showing their critical de-centering of such tradition, the essay reconfigures a possible space of cultural autonomy for African postcolonial writing away from the Italocentric space of discourse that has so far dominated its critical reception in Italy.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Il saggio ripercorre la costruzione di un’identità italiana bianca dove la retorica pubblicitaria dell’igiene e della cura del corpo nell’Italia fascista e postbellica riflettono la necessità di ‘ripulire’ e sbiancare il corpo della... more
Il saggio ripercorre la costruzione di un’identità italiana bianca dove la retorica pubblicitaria dell’igiene e della cura del corpo nell’Italia fascista e postbellica riflettono la necessità di ‘ripulire’ e sbiancare il corpo della nazione dalla memoria della violenza coloniale dal period post-bellico in poi.
Research Interests:
Following a visual trajectory that begins in the mid-1930s, this article discusses advertising for cleaning products in order to trace the peculiar formation of the idea of hygiene and its ideological ties to the larger, more subliminal... more
Following a visual trajectory that begins in the mid-1930s, this article discusses advertising for cleaning products in order to trace the peculiar formation of the idea of hygiene and its ideological ties to the larger, more subliminal project of the consolidation of Italian racial identity as uniformly and permanently white. The author contends that the peculiar ubiquity of whiteness - simultaneously expansive yet fixed – was carried forth, among other things, through a project of “redemptive hygiene” that was, in turn, mediated by the influence of Fascist racialist models and reflected in the postwar culture of advertising, also in virtue of the expansion of new technologies in support of a mass-mediated national culture. After considering Gino Boccasile’s propaganda and commercial posters and a key example (the Calimero ad for AVA) from the 1960s, the article concentrates on the 2006-2007 advertising campaign by the multinational company Guaber for one of their brands, Coloreria Italiana. This last example shows how the racialization of the space of the domestic plays with the ambiguous turn of the post-racial in contemporary Italy, where race is unhinged from a familiar ground in order to appear, be consumed, and be washed away.
Research Interests:
Questa introduzione al volume L’Italia postcoloniale presenta e analizza la condizione postcoloniale italiana come uno dei fattori determinanti della vita quotidiana che danno forma alla cultura contemporanea, identificando un’ampia... more
Questa introduzione al volume L’Italia postcoloniale presenta e analizza la condizione postcoloniale italiana come uno dei fattori determinanti della vita quotidiana che danno forma alla cultura contemporanea, identificando un’ampia varietà di discorsi, pratiche sociali e forme di
produzione culturale specificatamente postcoloniali che trovano espressione nella contemporaneità italiana. Il modo in cui il volume si inserisce nel campo degli studi postcoloniali non si limita all’esplorazione del rapporto tra ex colonizzatori ed ex colonizzati e neanche a una rilettura della storia e della cultura coloniali; esso considera piuttosto come il paradigma postcoloniale formuli nuove epistemologie prodotte da soggetti che prima non avevano voce, e allo stesso tempo sottolinea ed esamina le relazioni di potere poste in essere dal colonialismo e il modo in cui esse vengono perpetuate e corroborate nelle società postcoloniali contemporanee.
Il termine «postcoloniale» è sempre stato molto controverso, tanto a livello politico, quanto a livello teorico. Se da un lato questo termine rende invisibile la continuità esistente tra le relazioni di potere coloniali e quelle postcoloniali e neocoloniali, dall’altro esso rende indistinguibili le specificità spaziali e temporali, uniformandole a un modello che riflette una posizione coloniale eurocentrica. In linea con quanto affermato da alcuni critici, che mettono in guardia sul fatto che il prefisso «post» seguito dal termine «colonialismo» possa evocare la fine di una fase e in tal modo cancellare il legame esistente in epoca postcoloniale tra il colonialismo e i suoi effetti nel presente, la nostra concezione del postcoloniale si fonda sull’assunto che gli effetti economici e culturali del colonialismo sono tuttora presenti in molti Paesi, ivi inclusa l’Italia, soprattutto nel modo in cui gli squilibri introdotti dai poteri coloniali vengono ripristinati nel mondo globale odierno attraverso il trattamento ingiusto e l’esclusione dei migranti che provengono dai Paesi in via di sviluppo, a cui spesso viene negato l’accesso ai diritti umani e al privilegio di una cittadinanza globale. Partendo dalla consapevolezza che il prefisso «post» in «postcoloniale» segnala continuità piuttosto che frattura, il nostro volume adotta una prospettiva postcoloniale
sull’Italia contemporanea al fine di ridefinirne la storia culturale e l’identità nazionale.
produzione culturale specificatamente postcoloniali che trovano espressione nella contemporaneità italiana. Il modo in cui il volume si inserisce nel campo degli studi postcoloniali non si limita all’esplorazione del rapporto tra ex colonizzatori ed ex colonizzati e neanche a una rilettura della storia e della cultura coloniali; esso considera piuttosto come il paradigma postcoloniale formuli nuove epistemologie prodotte da soggetti che prima non avevano voce, e allo stesso tempo sottolinea ed esamina le relazioni di potere poste in essere dal colonialismo e il modo in cui esse vengono perpetuate e corroborate nelle società postcoloniali contemporanee.
Il termine «postcoloniale» è sempre stato molto controverso, tanto a livello politico, quanto a livello teorico. Se da un lato questo termine rende invisibile la continuità esistente tra le relazioni di potere coloniali e quelle postcoloniali e neocoloniali, dall’altro esso rende indistinguibili le specificità spaziali e temporali, uniformandole a un modello che riflette una posizione coloniale eurocentrica. In linea con quanto affermato da alcuni critici, che mettono in guardia sul fatto che il prefisso «post» seguito dal termine «colonialismo» possa evocare la fine di una fase e in tal modo cancellare il legame esistente in epoca postcoloniale tra il colonialismo e i suoi effetti nel presente, la nostra concezione del postcoloniale si fonda sull’assunto che gli effetti economici e culturali del colonialismo sono tuttora presenti in molti Paesi, ivi inclusa l’Italia, soprattutto nel modo in cui gli squilibri introdotti dai poteri coloniali vengono ripristinati nel mondo globale odierno attraverso il trattamento ingiusto e l’esclusione dei migranti che provengono dai Paesi in via di sviluppo, a cui spesso viene negato l’accesso ai diritti umani e al privilegio di una cittadinanza globale. Partendo dalla consapevolezza che il prefisso «post» in «postcoloniale» segnala continuità piuttosto che frattura, il nostro volume adotta una prospettiva postcoloniale
sull’Italia contemporanea al fine di ridefinirne la storia culturale e l’identità nazionale.