The essay gathers the results of a pilot study on African and new generation Afro-Italian designe... more The essay gathers the results of a pilot study on African and new generation Afro-Italian designers in Italy. It maps the emergence of a cultural identity discourse that incorporates notions of intercultural contact and social and cultural sustainability.
This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the cas... more This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the case study of the media company Twyg. Twyg’s online platform and social media accounts, particularly Instagram, participate in the production and circulation of a discourse on developmental fashion informed by principles of circularity and respect for diversity. The article discusses the communication strategy that Twyg employs to construct a positive discourse around luxury brands as drivers of a specific South African model of sustainability that pursues quality and craftsmanship, while preserving a local circular economy. The article is based on the author’s interviews with Twyg’s founder, Jackie May, and on cultural analysis of the materials published on the platform and Instagram channel. The discussion on sustainability builds on luxury studies, slow fashion studies, and the current debate on decolonialism, making a contribution to the literature on digital luxury in the global South. In particular, it expands the study of small independent actors, offering a reading that complements the more mainstream focus on big brands and international stakeholders.
This is a blog post for Afrosartorialism describing "Dead White Man's Clothes", a research projec... more This is a blog post for Afrosartorialism describing "Dead White Man's Clothes", a research project on fashion waste management at Kantamanto Market, Accra, by environmental activists Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner.
Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming... more Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming art and design movement. Kane is an interesting case study to grasp fashion’s involvement in Africa’s current debate surrounding identity and empowerment through innovation. This article discusses Kane’s designs in light of her contribution not only to contemporary approaches to African fashion that emphasize individuality, but also to effecting change through fashion, examining the ways in which she mixes symbols, signs, and techniques of African and international cultures to inscribe Africa, and Senegal in particular, into the global fashionscape.
In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo ... more In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, Rachel Donadio looks at the movie as a commentary on the impasse that seems to paralyze Italy. Through this viewfinder, the journalist writes, Sorrentino sets the stage to have his say on ‘a culture that is blocked, resigned, embalmed in elegant decline’, where ‘inertia overwhelms all forward momentum’. As with other movies produced in the last two decades, most notably Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, The Great Beauty is part lament, part critique of all that is wrong with a country that the fiction identifies with its political leadership. Italian directors criticize the country’s pervasive atmosphere of inertia and decadence. Sorrentino has often remarked that although his films are not political per se, their representation is a critique of Italy’s current state of affairs. Contemporary history, that is, lies at the core of his artistic engagement. Yet, the baroque aestheticism of The Great Beauty reworks current tensions in an ambiguous fashion. This chapter employs journalistic sources and textual analysis of the film to inquire into what kind of cultural memory of contemporary Italy emerges from the scene. It uses Sorrentino’s neo-baroque aesthetic register and filmic philosophy of civic engagement as frameworks to explore history in the making. To this end, the essay refers to Patricia Pisters’ recent work in The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012).
This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling tr... more This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for the bibliography of Congolese sapologie. Furthermore, this topic has found little to no space in the literature on black self-styling, in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism, and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’. I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of looking for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambitions and self-promotion.
The past fifteen years have seen a return of the opening title sequence as an object of scholarly... more The past fifteen years have seen a return of the opening title sequence as an object of scholarly interest, with the creative industry devoting consistent resources to its implementation. Openers have become an essential feature of media branding, proving a valuable output to launch creative studios and establish synergies between different sectors of the entertainment business. This essay looks at the functions of openers in the context of 21st century American television and, more specifically, the role of “quality” “contemplative” title sequences in the promotion of series airing on premium cable channels. This focus helps to understand their promotional function, offering a preliminary exploration of the scholarly methodology applied in their analysis. To this end, the article closes with a study of the main titles of Homeland (Showtime 2011-present), whose negative reception invites further investigation into the evolution of this cinematographic form.
Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this ... more Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this paper offers an empirical investigation of the multisensory appeal of HBO’s marketing of Boardwalk Empire, taking it as an example of a hyperaesthetics strategy of audience capture. To this end, the paper looks at the trailers for the show’s first season, as well as to its titles sequence and character posters, arguing that their chromatic enhancement, obtained in colour grading, invites a sensorial response, also contributing to confer a distinctive identity to its channel. In this light, hyperaesthetics is taken to stand for both an innovative approach to digital design, as maintained by Peter Lunenfeld, and as a marketing strategy of sensorial mobilisation, as theorised by David Howes. A look at HBO’s partnership with Canadian Club Whisky demonstrates the multisensory appeal of Boardwalk Empire’s campaign and its goal to brand the show as a lifestyle event. Even before we consume the actual show, this promotional strategy aims at embedding us within a semiotic and affective chain that prompts a variety of effects. The sensation of unqualified expectation and even excitement that is thus generated points toward marketing’s anticipative logic whereby hyperaesthetics generates affective attachment to as-yet unaired productions.
This paper investigates the relationship between BSG and the post-9/11 ecology of agitation in li... more This paper investigates the relationship between BSG and the post-9/11 ecology of agitation in light of George Bush’s strategy of collective perceptual management. While most readings focus on its allegory of the war on terror, I address the audiovisual strategies by which BSG appeals to the viewer’s senses, mapping the emergence of a post-9/11 sensibility. My suggestion is that the show’s relationship with the post-9/11 reality rests in the power to address the audience’s feelings. To this end, I look at BSG’s aesthetics of crisis as operating as an affective vector, playing out in an informational system that invests in affective solicitation to provoke a bodily response in the audience. Given the status of television as the principal medium of post-9/11 governmental perceptual modulation, I argue that BSG’s relationship with the war on terror is rooted in an ability to express meaning and feeling, keeping a sensation of agitation alive throughout a four-season run. To expose the political value of the show’s aesthetics, I look not at the codes, as at the expressions and style that make up a scenario of sensorial stimulation where feeling becomes a biopolitical operator. Indeed, BSG’s cinematographic techniques and haptic visuals, chromatic shifts and aural evocations effectively manufacture agitation, exposing a tension between the show’s status as an allegory of the contemporary world and its complicity with practices of televised affective engineering.
Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma te... more Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato che adotta analisi di stampo tanto rappresentativo che affettivo. Assumendo la soggettivazione nel senso attribuito a questo concetto da Foucault, come un processo storico collegato una configurazione epistemologica e spaziotemporale ben definita, il saggio sostiene che la comunicazione audiovisuale operi come un dispositivo di posizionamento sociale e di mobilitazione percettiva. Inoltre, esso avanza la proposta teorica di analizzare le dinamiche di interazione e socializzazione, che sempre più spesso vengono generate dai cosiddetti nuovi media, in relazione alla New Economy al fine di evidenziare in che modo la produzione sociale sia sfruttata come valore di mercato.
The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret ... more The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret it as a singularity: a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
With its exposé of government conspiracies and its claims for a more critical citizenship distrus... more With its exposé of government conspiracies and its claims for a more critical citizenship distrustful of political institutions, The X-Files tapped into the 1990s climate and captured more than any other contemporary TV show the fears plaguing the end of the century. However, in the wake of the upheaval caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the show lost touch with its audience’s concerns. This article analyses the post-9/11 irrelevance of The X-Files and reads Battlestar Galactica, a TV show that began its run in 2005, as The X-Files’ heir. Battlestar Galactica, the article sustains, came to fill the void left by The X-Files with its commentary on George W. Bush’s security and military operations against terrorism and its engagement with current anxieties.
This is a solicited article that I wrote for Griot Magazine. The article discusses the fashion fi... more This is a solicited article that I wrote for Griot Magazine. The article discusses the fashion film "Banyoloyi a Bosigo" directed by the South African visual artist Kristin-Lee Moolman for Thebe Magugu's Autumn/Winter 2021 collection "Alchemy" and presented virtually at Paris Fashion Week 2021. The topic of the film+collection is indigenous spirituality in South Africa. You can read the article at this link: https://griotmag.com/en/the-ancestral-is-modern-in-thebe-magugus-banyoloyi-a-bosigo/
A blog post where I give a definition of afrosartorialism and introduce the fashion+conceptual ar... more A blog post where I give a definition of afrosartorialism and introduce the fashion+conceptual art blog "iamdasidy"/yellowverses
The essay gathers the results of a pilot study on African and new generation Afro-Italian designe... more The essay gathers the results of a pilot study on African and new generation Afro-Italian designers in Italy. It maps the emergence of a cultural identity discourse that incorporates notions of intercultural contact and social and cultural sustainability.
This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the cas... more This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the case study of the media company Twyg. Twyg’s online platform and social media accounts, particularly Instagram, participate in the production and circulation of a discourse on developmental fashion informed by principles of circularity and respect for diversity. The article discusses the communication strategy that Twyg employs to construct a positive discourse around luxury brands as drivers of a specific South African model of sustainability that pursues quality and craftsmanship, while preserving a local circular economy. The article is based on the author’s interviews with Twyg’s founder, Jackie May, and on cultural analysis of the materials published on the platform and Instagram channel. The discussion on sustainability builds on luxury studies, slow fashion studies, and the current debate on decolonialism, making a contribution to the literature on digital luxury in the global South. In particular, it expands the study of small independent actors, offering a reading that complements the more mainstream focus on big brands and international stakeholders.
This is a blog post for Afrosartorialism describing "Dead White Man's Clothes", a research projec... more This is a blog post for Afrosartorialism describing "Dead White Man's Clothes", a research project on fashion waste management at Kantamanto Market, Accra, by environmental activists Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner.
Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming... more Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming art and design movement. Kane is an interesting case study to grasp fashion’s involvement in Africa’s current debate surrounding identity and empowerment through innovation. This article discusses Kane’s designs in light of her contribution not only to contemporary approaches to African fashion that emphasize individuality, but also to effecting change through fashion, examining the ways in which she mixes symbols, signs, and techniques of African and international cultures to inscribe Africa, and Senegal in particular, into the global fashionscape.
In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo ... more In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, Rachel Donadio looks at the movie as a commentary on the impasse that seems to paralyze Italy. Through this viewfinder, the journalist writes, Sorrentino sets the stage to have his say on ‘a culture that is blocked, resigned, embalmed in elegant decline’, where ‘inertia overwhelms all forward momentum’. As with other movies produced in the last two decades, most notably Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, The Great Beauty is part lament, part critique of all that is wrong with a country that the fiction identifies with its political leadership. Italian directors criticize the country’s pervasive atmosphere of inertia and decadence. Sorrentino has often remarked that although his films are not political per se, their representation is a critique of Italy’s current state of affairs. Contemporary history, that is, lies at the core of his artistic engagement. Yet, the baroque aestheticism of The Great Beauty reworks current tensions in an ambiguous fashion. This chapter employs journalistic sources and textual analysis of the film to inquire into what kind of cultural memory of contemporary Italy emerges from the scene. It uses Sorrentino’s neo-baroque aesthetic register and filmic philosophy of civic engagement as frameworks to explore history in the making. To this end, the essay refers to Patricia Pisters’ recent work in The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012).
This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling tr... more This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for the bibliography of Congolese sapologie. Furthermore, this topic has found little to no space in the literature on black self-styling, in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism, and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’. I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of looking for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambitions and self-promotion.
The past fifteen years have seen a return of the opening title sequence as an object of scholarly... more The past fifteen years have seen a return of the opening title sequence as an object of scholarly interest, with the creative industry devoting consistent resources to its implementation. Openers have become an essential feature of media branding, proving a valuable output to launch creative studios and establish synergies between different sectors of the entertainment business. This essay looks at the functions of openers in the context of 21st century American television and, more specifically, the role of “quality” “contemplative” title sequences in the promotion of series airing on premium cable channels. This focus helps to understand their promotional function, offering a preliminary exploration of the scholarly methodology applied in their analysis. To this end, the article closes with a study of the main titles of Homeland (Showtime 2011-present), whose negative reception invites further investigation into the evolution of this cinematographic form.
Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this ... more Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this paper offers an empirical investigation of the multisensory appeal of HBO’s marketing of Boardwalk Empire, taking it as an example of a hyperaesthetics strategy of audience capture. To this end, the paper looks at the trailers for the show’s first season, as well as to its titles sequence and character posters, arguing that their chromatic enhancement, obtained in colour grading, invites a sensorial response, also contributing to confer a distinctive identity to its channel. In this light, hyperaesthetics is taken to stand for both an innovative approach to digital design, as maintained by Peter Lunenfeld, and as a marketing strategy of sensorial mobilisation, as theorised by David Howes. A look at HBO’s partnership with Canadian Club Whisky demonstrates the multisensory appeal of Boardwalk Empire’s campaign and its goal to brand the show as a lifestyle event. Even before we consume the actual show, this promotional strategy aims at embedding us within a semiotic and affective chain that prompts a variety of effects. The sensation of unqualified expectation and even excitement that is thus generated points toward marketing’s anticipative logic whereby hyperaesthetics generates affective attachment to as-yet unaired productions.
This paper investigates the relationship between BSG and the post-9/11 ecology of agitation in li... more This paper investigates the relationship between BSG and the post-9/11 ecology of agitation in light of George Bush’s strategy of collective perceptual management. While most readings focus on its allegory of the war on terror, I address the audiovisual strategies by which BSG appeals to the viewer’s senses, mapping the emergence of a post-9/11 sensibility. My suggestion is that the show’s relationship with the post-9/11 reality rests in the power to address the audience’s feelings. To this end, I look at BSG’s aesthetics of crisis as operating as an affective vector, playing out in an informational system that invests in affective solicitation to provoke a bodily response in the audience. Given the status of television as the principal medium of post-9/11 governmental perceptual modulation, I argue that BSG’s relationship with the war on terror is rooted in an ability to express meaning and feeling, keeping a sensation of agitation alive throughout a four-season run. To expose the political value of the show’s aesthetics, I look not at the codes, as at the expressions and style that make up a scenario of sensorial stimulation where feeling becomes a biopolitical operator. Indeed, BSG’s cinematographic techniques and haptic visuals, chromatic shifts and aural evocations effectively manufacture agitation, exposing a tension between the show’s status as an allegory of the contemporary world and its complicity with practices of televised affective engineering.
Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma te... more Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato che adotta analisi di stampo tanto rappresentativo che affettivo. Assumendo la soggettivazione nel senso attribuito a questo concetto da Foucault, come un processo storico collegato una configurazione epistemologica e spaziotemporale ben definita, il saggio sostiene che la comunicazione audiovisuale operi come un dispositivo di posizionamento sociale e di mobilitazione percettiva. Inoltre, esso avanza la proposta teorica di analizzare le dinamiche di interazione e socializzazione, che sempre più spesso vengono generate dai cosiddetti nuovi media, in relazione alla New Economy al fine di evidenziare in che modo la produzione sociale sia sfruttata come valore di mercato.
The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret ... more The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret it as a singularity: a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
With its exposé of government conspiracies and its claims for a more critical citizenship distrus... more With its exposé of government conspiracies and its claims for a more critical citizenship distrustful of political institutions, The X-Files tapped into the 1990s climate and captured more than any other contemporary TV show the fears plaguing the end of the century. However, in the wake of the upheaval caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the show lost touch with its audience’s concerns. This article analyses the post-9/11 irrelevance of The X-Files and reads Battlestar Galactica, a TV show that began its run in 2005, as The X-Files’ heir. Battlestar Galactica, the article sustains, came to fill the void left by The X-Files with its commentary on George W. Bush’s security and military operations against terrorism and its engagement with current anxieties.
This is a solicited article that I wrote for Griot Magazine. The article discusses the fashion fi... more This is a solicited article that I wrote for Griot Magazine. The article discusses the fashion film "Banyoloyi a Bosigo" directed by the South African visual artist Kristin-Lee Moolman for Thebe Magugu's Autumn/Winter 2021 collection "Alchemy" and presented virtually at Paris Fashion Week 2021. The topic of the film+collection is indigenous spirituality in South Africa. You can read the article at this link: https://griotmag.com/en/the-ancestral-is-modern-in-thebe-magugus-banyoloyi-a-bosigo/
A blog post where I give a definition of afrosartorialism and introduce the fashion+conceptual ar... more A blog post where I give a definition of afrosartorialism and introduce the fashion+conceptual art blog "iamdasidy"/yellowverses
A brief analysis of Valentino's new 'primitivist' collection (spring/summer 2016) and the critiqu... more A brief analysis of Valentino's new 'primitivist' collection (spring/summer 2016) and the critique of European cultural appropriation in fashion, with references to the work of Victoria Rovine and Krystine Loughran.
This post contains theoretical annotations on photo-manipulation that I am collecting for a publi... more This post contains theoretical annotations on photo-manipulation that I am collecting for a publication on retro-looking fashion photography.
The theme of water in African cultures and histories is the object of extended studies in multipl... more The theme of water in African cultures and histories is the object of extended studies in multiple disciplinary areas. Empires and civilizations emerged along the banks of the great African rivers and lakes and on the continent’s coasts. Water, a primary necessity for settlement and existence, has always been at the heart of the pastoral-nomadic relationship in sub-Saharan Africa, and at the same time a fundamental pathway for transportation and trade. The explorations of the sources of rivers and the inherent possibilities of the waterways accelerated and justified the first exploratory missions by Europeans, inspiring a controversial literature ranging from Herodotus to Conrad. A self-controlled narrative on this issue could and should be greatly expanded. However, water is a symbol of identity and identification, an ancestral element of spirituality, of artistic inspiration of old and contemporary mythologies.
As the very source of survival and security for millions of people, water is one of Africa's greatest concerns. Today, water insecurity triggered by the withering of the sources of drinkable water – an example is Lake Chad – is among the main causes of conflict and (internal and international) displacement across the continent – a phenomenon that will grow as climate change worsens. Several water preservation projects have been implemented, including, several decades ago, that of Lake Nasser. These national and inter-state initiatives – along with the ones of international cooperation—foresee investments in water management and the creation of new infrastructures to guarantee widespread access to water, yielding a positive impact on the social and environmental communities that depend on them and setting the condition for a widespread improvement of the quality of life. However, the same projects are also cause of conflict, as in the case of the new dams to be built in the Ethiopian region of the Nile.
Thus, as remarked by the Burkinabé historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, water is also at the forefront of geopolitics and governance as it informs contemporary debates on sustainability, social justice, international relations and, thus far, decolonization.
This thematic issue of Africa e Mediterraneo aims to include contributions on the real and imaginary forms of water in Africa and for Africa.
Deadlines
The deadline to submit an abstract of no more than 400 word is **31 January 2023**. The abstract must be sent to abstract@africaemediterraneo.it. It will be reviewed by the editors of the issue. The deadline for submitting the finished article, along with a 100-word abstract and short profile of the author, is **31 March 2023**. Africa e Mediterraneo is a blind peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles in Italian, English, and French.
Africa e Mediterraneo is a biannual, multilingual journal that publishes articles on multiple asp... more Africa e Mediterraneo is a biannual, multilingual journal that publishes articles on multiple aspects of African cultures and societies, Afro-European relations, and global interdependencies. The circular economy, fashion, and the arts have been the subject of the journal's most recent issues. Africa e Mediterraneo now invites submissions of essays, articles, reviews and interviews to be included in the Miscellanea issue, forthcoming December 2022. Issue n. 97 seeks transdisciplinary proposals on a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, literature, history, visual arts, anthropology, fashion, geography, and linguistics.
There are multiple forms of racism, which are at the root of expressions of contempt and exclusio... more There are multiple forms of racism, which are at the root of expressions of contempt and exclusion towards individuals or groups who belong to ethnic and cultural communities that are deemed different and often inferior. These expressions are pivotal to the social fractures and conflicts that have taken place in Africa and, more generally, in the societies mixed by-forced and otherwise-transnational migrations.
(de)gendering the postcolonial
Postcoloniali e generi – postcoloniali degeneri
Eds. Marta Carie... more (de)gendering the postcolonial Postcoloniali e generi – postcoloniali degeneri
Eds. Marta Cariello and Serena Guarracino
For the first issue of de genere, we intend to open the discussion on a broad range of topics which we hope will recur in future issues, in order to set a framework of intervention for the dialogue this newborn journal intends to activate. Postcolonial and gender, both in theoretical elaboration and through literary and artistic practices, have been in an ongoing conversation after the inception of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty called Third World feminism (1988). Yet in the intervening years gender has become a more multifaceted concept (see Butler, Muñoz, Preciado), although gendered bodies are still radically informed by their own location as well as by transnational power discourses. At the same time, while postcolonial literature and art have both, in a sense, gone ‘mainstream’ (as Sandra Ponzanesi’s recent monograph shows), neocolonial imaginaries shaped by contemporary international politics have renewed the challenges of neo-orientalist hegemonies (Appadurai, Balibar, Gandhi, Yegenoglu).
We welcome contributions investigating the ways in which the postcolonial emerges as a gendered discourse, and how contemporary gender elaborations take into account the complex layerings of postcolonial temporalities. Our intention is to map (albeit tentatively) the ways in which gender and postcolonial theories and narratives interface without necessarily coalescing. Their intertwined and/or divergent trajectories can be traced in theoretical frameworks as well as in literature and artistic practices, addressing the following issues and related topics:
The postcolonial gendered body in literature and the arts The sexual politics of postcolonial writing Gender and postcolonial: intersecting theories, divergent practices? Narratives of transition: resignifying identities in migration Whiteness and blackness as gendered narratives Genre/gender: a postcolonial écriture féminine? Performing gender, performing race The threatened male body / the male body as threat For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com
Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 30 June 2015.
This chapter presents Adichie's promotion of Nigerian fashion as a political act that calls atte... more This chapter presents Adichie's promotion of Nigerian fashion as a political act that calls attention to racial and gender imbalances of power and influence at the global level.
Employing FlashForward’s campaign as its case study, this chapter addresses the changes undergone... more Employing FlashForward’s campaign as its case study, this chapter addresses the changes undergone by television advertising in its “beyond broadcast moment” (Evans, 2010). In this respect, the clairvoyance motif that sustains the narrative, where characters are compelled to act upon their future, works as a metatextual source of analysis of the speculative mechanisms governing television promotion. What do commercial strategies, operating in a chaotic multimedia landscape, suggest about 21st century television marketing? FlashForward offers a starting point to understand how the pre-emptive management of the time of consumption influences current conceptions of audience engagement.
The chapter addresses FlashForward’s promotion, mapping its expansion both in terms of ABC’s penetration into the viewers’ lives by means of ambient promotion, and recourse to multiple technologies of media consumption. This mapping envisions a strategy of anticipative engagement that attempts not only to colonise the lives of prospective viewers with promotional messages, but also to ensure that their expectations become productive for the network’s development of the show. In this respect, promotion operates not to impose a single message and set of meanings about FlashForward. On the contrary, my analysis reveals that promotion gets productive the moment it becomes inspirational of a potentially infinite universe of ‘storyworlds’ that the audience is incited to conjure and keep alive. The chapter contends that FlashForward’s promotion offers itself as a grid, or web, to capture bottom-up invention, at the same time that it provides audiences with new technologies and techniques of engagement with the series. The conclusions reflect on the shortcomings of this speculative approach, contending that it highlights a discrepancy between ABC’s “brand image” and “brand identity.”
The TV show Mad Men (2007 – present)1 explores the world of postwar working-class America through... more The TV show Mad Men (2007 – present)1 explores the world of postwar working-class America through the eyes of Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), a copywriter from Madison Avenue, New York. Draper’s job in the booming 1960s advertising industry provides a look into the social history of twentieth century America that deconstructs representations of the times as a period of stability and easy social advancement. Through a reworking of postwar Hollywood aesthetics, Mad Men focuses on Draper’s difficulties in concealing his working-class origins and negotiating a middle-class personality. His enterprising, yet conflicted identity, dwelling in between two worlds, embodies the contradictions that afflicted a generation of “mental” salaried laborers and the crisis of class-consciousness that accompanied the postwar bourgeoisification of the American. Draper’s struggle to retain integrity in the face of instability reveals how Mad Men’s representation of work is tied to the work of representation of a drifting and unstable self.
"The aim of this essay is to map the forms of monstrosity appearing in ABC’s series Lost, examini... more "The aim of this essay is to map the forms of monstrosity appearing in ABC’s series Lost, examining them in the light of the narrative of fear that characterized Bush’s presidency. Although this discourse, endorsing neocolonialism and state control into the lives of its citizens, has given way to Barack Obama’s more positive grammar of “hope,” concerns with security both in the US and abroad continue to address the threat linked to an unpredictable and metamorphic typology of risks. Since Lost aired in the hottest years of the War on Terror, from 2004 to 2010, its representation of monstrosity, and the changes it undergoes in its seasonal progression from material to increasingly incorporeal forms of monstrosity, are useful to examine the emergence of a discourse of global uncertainty that reverberates to this day."
in Kathryn A. Morey ed. Bringing History to Life through Film (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press), Aug 2013
This chapter provides a case study of HBO/BBC Two’s miniseries Parade’s End (2012), an adaptation... more This chapter provides a case study of HBO/BBC Two’s miniseries Parade’s End (2012), an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s teralogy by the same title published between 1924 and 1928. The miniseries can be regarded as a heritage genre that represents Edwardian Britain through mise-en-scène and a partially autobiographical narrative. The main protagonist is Christopher Tietjens, a Yorkshire aristocrat living at the time of World War I and in the midst of a tormented love triangle. The chapter contends that Parade’s End reflects BBC’s consistent investment in historical fictions, which it employs to pursue “quality” policies in a time of financial restructuring. Placing the miniseries in the context of a global trend of “cutting-edge period” narratives, the chapters looks at how economic concerns intertwine with a conservative political cultural turn of the British broadcaster. Here, as in other BBC’s programmes, the prominence accorded to the representation of male vulnerability fashions an idea of British identity that is at the same time nostalgic and patriarchal. What does this representation suggest of contemporary views of national masculinity and what is the role of historical fiction in sustaining and formulating them? Romanticism and sacrifice, heroism and perseverance concur to elevate Tietjens to symbol of integrity and authenticity, values that the BBC champions as pillars of morality and good social conduct.
Why and how has luxury come to be considered a borrowed notion in Africa? What does exclusivity m... more Why and how has luxury come to be considered a borrowed notion in Africa? What does exclusivity mean in contexts where the performance of economic empowerment is regarded as a betrayal of communal advancement? And in what ways does the focus on African luxury contribute to the emerging discipline of critical luxury studies (Armitage 2016)? These are some of the questions addressed in African Luxury: The Politics and Aesthetics of Luxury in Africa, the anthology edited by Mehita Iqani and Simidele Dosekun that is the first overview of this theme from a pan-African vantage. African Luxury addresses the dearth of scholarly work on luxury and the African continent, proposing that it evidences a bias in the perception of the continent that has roots in colonial epistemologies and in the structure of neoliberal capitalism. The volume examines how corporate, political, and individual actors have signified luxury in the last twenty years and how opulence forges (or fails to forge) sociality throughout the continent. The three sections analyze representations of African luxury in the media ("Africa Risen"), the labour of value and associated discourses of taste and cultural capital ("(Re)Crafting African Styles"), and the spatial politics of luxury ("Ambiguous Luxury Space"). The authors present case studies from Nigeria, South Africa, the DRC, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Togo that draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives (social semiotics, visual studies, media studies, and anthropology). These contributions share the aim of countering assumptions that luxury is antithetical to African living and that African opulence is imitative and kitsch. This vision of a passive continent imbibing foreign notions of the good life is shown to be widespread in the mainstream, denoting the Eurocentric bias of most of the extant literature. It constructs the continent as a recipient of, not only the material benefits of market-led modernization, but of its ideology as well. Indeed, self-indulgent wastefulness and the pleasures of leisure and travel, which Patrizia Calefato names as indicators of luxury in her book on this subject (2014), indicate an extravagant prosperity that hardly fits the stereotype of Africa as a site of scarcity and need.
This chapter presents Adichie's promotion of Nigerian fashion as a political act that cal... more This chapter presents Adichie's promotion of Nigerian fashion as a political act that calls attention to racial and gender imbalances of power and influence at the global level.
"The aim of this essay is to map the forms of monstrosity appearing in ABC’s series Lost, ex... more "The aim of this essay is to map the forms of monstrosity appearing in ABC’s series Lost, examining them in the light of the narrative of fear that characterized Bush’s presidency. Although this discourse, endorsing neocolonialism and state control into the lives of its citizens, has given way to Barack Obama’s more positive grammar of “hope,” concerns with security both in the US and abroad continue to address the threat linked to an unpredictable and metamorphic typology of risks. Since Lost aired in the hottest years of the War on Terror, from 2004 to 2010, its representation of monstrosity, and the changes it undergoes in its seasonal progression from material to increasingly incorporeal forms of monstrosity, are useful to examine the emergence of a discourse of global uncertainty that reverberates to this day."
Why and how has luxury come to be considered a borrowed notion in Africa? What does exclusivity m... more Why and how has luxury come to be considered a borrowed notion in Africa? What does exclusivity mean in contexts where the performance of economic empowerment is regarded as a betrayal of communal advancement? And in what ways does the focus on African luxury contribute to the emerging discipline of critical luxury studies (Armitage 2016)? These are some of the questions addressed in African Luxury: The Politics and Aesthetics of Luxury in Africa, the anthology edited by Mehita Iqani and Simidele Dosekun that is the first overview of this theme from a pan-African vantage.
This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the cas... more This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the case study of the media company Twyg. Twyg’s online platform and social media accounts, particularly Instagram, participate in the production and circulation of a discourse on developmental fashion informed by principles of circularity and respect for diversity. The article discusses the communication strategy that Twyg employs to construct a positive discourse around luxury brands as drivers of a specific South African model of sustainability that pursues quality and craftsmanship, while preserving a local circular economy. The article is based on the author’s interviews with Twyg’s founder, Jackie May, and on cultural analysis of the materials published on the platform and Instagram channel. The discussion on sustainability builds on luxury studies, slow fashion studies, and the current debate on decolonialism, making a contribution to the literature on digital luxury in the global South....
Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming... more Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming art and design movement. Kane is an interesting case study to grasp fashion’s involvement in Africa’s current debate surrounding identity and empowerment through innovation. This article discusses Kane’s designs in light of her contribution not only to contemporary approaches to African fashion that emphasize individuality, but also to effecting change through fashion, examining the ways in which she mixes symbols, signs, and techniques of African and international cultures to inscribe Africa, and Senegal in particular, into the global fashionscape.
When, in May 2009, American television networks presented their fall line-ups, ABC s schedule was... more When, in May 2009, American television networks presented their fall line-ups, ABC s schedule was especially ambitious. Compared to the previous year when it had offered few original shows, the network now introduced seven productions based on a ‘portfolio approach’ that catered to different tastes and cost/production strategies (Berman, 2009). Among the additions to the line-up was FlashForward (ABC, 2009), a science-fiction drama that soon became the object of speculation. The series focused on a group of FBI agents investigating the consequences of a blackout that causes the entire world to lose consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, during which time everyone has a vision of themselves on 29 April 2010.
This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling tr... more This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for the bibliography of Congolese sapologie. Furthermore, this topic has found little to no space in the literature on black self-styling, in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism, and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’. I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of looking for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambitions and self-promotion.
Italiano: Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un pa... more Italiano: Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato che adotta analisi di stampo tanto rappresentativo che affettivo. Assumendo la soggettivazione nel senso attribuito a questo concetto da Foucault, come un processo storico collegato una configurazione epistemologica e spaziotemporale ben definita, il saggio sostiene che la comunicazione audiovisuale operi come un dispositivo di posizionamento sociale e di mobilitazione percettiva. Inoltre, esso avanza la proposta teorica di analizzare le dinamiche di interazione e socializzazione, che sempre piu spesso vengono generate dai cosiddetti nuovi media, in relazione alla New Economy al fine di evidenziare in che modo la produzione sociale sia sfruttata come valore di mercato. English: This essay addresses the relationship between subjectivation and communication, employing a stratified theoretical paradigm based on representational and affective analyses. Taking s...
In the last decade, television channels have often employed experimental promotional campaigns to... more In the last decade, television channels have often employed experimental promotional campaigns to launch new shows and make viewing more interactive. At the height of its popularity, for example, Lost (ABC 2004-10) had about forty ancillary components, being also the first show available for real-time download on iTunes and streamed full-length on mobile phones. In addition, Lost counted many textual and diegetic extensions such as candy bars and working clothes inspired by the show. Through these synergies, ABC sought to increase the visibility and quality of the audience's relationship with Lost by extending the narrative universe into the real lives of viewers (Mittell). Following in this track, other networks have been devising ways that intensify the audience's commitment to TV worlds. Drawing on industrial and corporate sources, this paper focuses on HBO's marketing for Boardwalk Empire (2010-present), contending that its promotional campaign deploys a hyperaesthet...
From its 2007 debut to its sixth season’s finale that aired in June 2013, AMC’s series Mad Men ha... more From its 2007 debut to its sixth season’s finale that aired in June 2013, AMC’s series Mad Men has been greatly praised as well as emulated. Critics place it among the harbingers of the medium’s renaissance in what has been called television’s “platinum age,” maintaining that its exploration of WASP ennui through the lives of characters gravitating around 1960s Madison Avenue attests, among other things, to an effort to elevate television’s standard by means of a cinematographic, “quality” production style. Hailed as “must-see TV” by the likes of U.S. President Barack Obama, this is, indisputably, one of the most discussed TV series of all times.
Ensayos Sobre Ciencia Ficcion Y Literatura Fantastica 1er Congreso Internacional De Literatura Fantastica Y Ciencia Ficcion 2008 Isbn 9788469187326 Pags 553 565, 2008
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Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
https://afrosartorialism.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/afrosartorialists-journey-to-europe-and-a-new-talent-in-my-spotlight/
Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
https://afrosartorialism.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/afrosartorialists-journey-to-europe-and-a-new-talent-in-my-spotlight/
As the very source of survival and security for millions of people, water is one of Africa's greatest concerns. Today, water insecurity triggered by the withering of the sources of drinkable water – an example is Lake Chad – is among the main causes of conflict and (internal and international) displacement across the continent – a phenomenon that will grow as climate change worsens. Several water preservation projects have been implemented, including, several decades ago, that of Lake Nasser. These national and inter-state initiatives – along with the ones of international cooperation—foresee investments in water management and the creation of new infrastructures to guarantee widespread access to water, yielding a positive impact on the social and environmental communities that depend on them and setting the condition for a widespread improvement of the quality of life. However, the same projects are also cause of conflict, as in the case of the new dams to be built in the Ethiopian region of the Nile.
Thus, as remarked by the Burkinabé historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, water is also at the forefront of geopolitics and governance as it informs contemporary debates on sustainability, social justice, international relations and, thus far, decolonization.
This thematic issue of Africa e Mediterraneo aims to include contributions on the real and imaginary forms of water in Africa and for Africa.
Deadlines
The deadline to submit an abstract of no more than 400 word is **31 January 2023**. The abstract must be sent to abstract@africaemediterraneo.it. It will be reviewed by the editors of the issue. The deadline for submitting the finished article, along with a 100-word abstract and short profile of the author, is **31 March 2023**.
Africa e Mediterraneo is a blind peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles in Italian, English, and French.
Postcoloniali e generi – postcoloniali degeneri
Eds. Marta Cariello and Serena Guarracino
For the first issue of de genere, we intend to open the discussion on a broad range of topics which we hope will recur in future issues, in order to set a framework of intervention for the dialogue this newborn journal intends to activate. Postcolonial and gender, both in theoretical elaboration and through literary and artistic practices, have been in an ongoing conversation after the inception of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty called Third World feminism (1988). Yet in the intervening years gender has become a more multifaceted concept (see Butler, Muñoz, Preciado), although gendered bodies are still radically informed by their own location as well as by transnational power discourses. At the same time, while postcolonial literature and art have both, in a sense, gone ‘mainstream’ (as Sandra Ponzanesi’s recent monograph shows), neocolonial imaginaries shaped by contemporary international politics have renewed the challenges of neo-orientalist hegemonies (Appadurai, Balibar, Gandhi, Yegenoglu).
We welcome contributions investigating the ways in which the postcolonial emerges as a gendered discourse, and how contemporary gender elaborations take into account the complex layerings of postcolonial temporalities. Our intention is to map (albeit tentatively) the ways in which gender and postcolonial theories and narratives interface without necessarily coalescing. Their intertwined and/or divergent trajectories can be traced in theoretical frameworks as well as in literature and artistic practices, addressing the following issues and related topics:
The postcolonial gendered body in literature and the arts
The sexual politics of postcolonial writing
Gender and postcolonial: intersecting theories, divergent practices?
Narratives of transition: resignifying identities in migration
Whiteness and blackness as gendered narratives
Genre/gender: a postcolonial écriture féminine?
Performing gender, performing race
The threatened male body / the male body as threat
For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com
Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 30 June 2015.
Articles will be due on 15 September 2015.
For submission guidelines and further info: www.degenere-journal.it
The chapter addresses FlashForward’s promotion, mapping its expansion both in terms of ABC’s penetration into the viewers’ lives by means of ambient promotion, and recourse to multiple technologies of media consumption. This mapping envisions a strategy of anticipative engagement that attempts not only to colonise the lives of prospective viewers with promotional messages, but also to ensure that their expectations become productive for the network’s development of the show. In this respect, promotion operates not to impose a single message and set of meanings about FlashForward. On the contrary, my analysis reveals that promotion gets productive the moment it becomes inspirational of a potentially infinite universe of ‘storyworlds’ that the audience is incited to conjure and keep alive. The chapter contends that FlashForward’s promotion offers itself as a grid, or web, to capture bottom-up invention, at the same time that it provides audiences with new technologies and techniques of engagement with the series. The conclusions reflect on the shortcomings of this speculative approach, contending that it highlights a discrepancy between ABC’s “brand image” and “brand identity.”