Rhiannon Noel Welch | University of California, Berkeley (original) (raw)
Translations by Rhiannon Noel Welch
![Research paper thumbnail of Gabriele D’Annunzio, “On the Cinematograph as an Instrument of Liberation and an Art of Transfiguration" [1914],” in Richard Abel ed., Early Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2013), vol. IV (“Primary Sources”), 267-272.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37900763/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Translation of Gabriele D'Annunzio's famous essay on the nature of motion pictures
Papers by Rhiannon Noel Welch
Routledge, Jul 24, 2015
Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically eng... more Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically engaged Italian films about immigration. Because the film invites viewers to consider not only fascist Italy’s colonial occupation of Albania under Mussolini, but also parallels between Italian emigration to the Americas in the early 20th century and Albanian immigration to Italy in the second half of the same century, Lamerica is often considered among Italy’s earliest postcolonial films. To call a film produced in the mid-1990’s one of Italy’s ‘earliest’ postcolonial films will understandably give some readers pause, as such a designation calls forth one of the enduring topoi of colonial and postcolonial Italy--that of belatedness. If Italy arrived ‘late’ to the colonial scramble for Africa and to the conquest of modernity that African colonization promised, so too has Italy arrived ‘late’ to its postcoloniality. This essay takes up temporality as one of the key rhetorical figures of (post)colonial Italian cultural production through a reading of structures of racialization in Lamerica. Amelio’s film asks us to consider not only the role of history in shaping national identity, but also how racialization is carried out in the absence of what Fanon memorably called the “racial epidermal schema.” Amelio’s film demonstrates how postcolonial racial representation is carried out through two mechanisms: biopolitical discourse about hygiene and contagious disease and the ascription of divergent temporalities to national populations. The film shuttles back and forth between these modes in order to ponder the mobility or fixity of racialized national identity in the era(s) of mass global migrations.
California Italian Studies
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. T... more Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. Arundati Roy Crisis, Contagion, and Care Contagion has perhaps never before preoccupied all corners of the world, all at once, as it has for the past two years and counting. The "virus that knows no borders" has erected palpable ones around all manner of human activity in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19: from the oft-photographed shower curtain hugs or at-the-window visits between elderly people and their loved ones at the outset of the pandemic, to "shutdowns" that confined the privileged classes to their home offices and computer screens (Fogu, Hom, Ruberto 2019, 3). At the same time, ostensibly prophylactic border closures from countries where the outbreak raged have "mix[ed] up medical and political quarantines" and revealed the ambivalent boundaries between politics and science (Ticktin 2020). The death drive that has long haunted neoliberal governance has come starkly to the fore: people deemed essential to the economy have been revealed to be disposable, forced to choose between life and livelihood. Indeed, for communities of color the world over, livelihood has become a tragic oxymoron, insofar as protecting "a means of securing the necessities of life," as the New Oxford American Dictionary defines it, entails accepting elevated levels of risk to one's health. The languages of health and well-being have shuttled back and forth between biological bodies and economic ones, as the so-called health of the economy requires the sacrifice of human life, its exposure to viral contact and contagion. Yet for all of the boundaries and fissures it has brought into stark relief-from centuries of systemic racism and the brutality of border regimes, to economic inequality, distinctions between "essential" and "non-essential" work, between self and other-the very nature of a pandemic has reminded us of our shared vulnerability, creating an opening that in early 2020 made the waters
Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts... more Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses shaped the "making" of Italians as modern political subjects in the years between its administrative unification (1861–1870) and the end of the First World War (1919). The book includes readings of texts by Italian thinkers such as Leopoldo Franchetti and Paolo Mantegazza and it offers new readings of well- and lesser-known texts by a writer who has become Italy's most infamous precursor to Mussolini: poet, novelist, and political provocateur Gabriele D'Annunzio. Vital Subjects concludes with an original analysis of an early film that figures prominently in the history of cinema: Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 silent film Cabiria— produced in the wake of the Italian invasion of Libya (1911–12) and celebrating ancient Roman ...
California Italian Studies, 2017
In June of 2014, Danish sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, after a monthlong ... more In June of 2014, Danish sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, after a monthlong residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwatz, submerged forty-eight figures evocative of human shapes, wrapped in concrete canvas resembling funerary sheets and body bags, into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the southern Italian port town of Pizzo (Calabria). 1 The human forms were meant to serve as markers for the thousands of unidentified dead refugees and asylum seekers washing up on Italy's shores, making the Mediterranean into what some have ominously dubbed a vast "necroregion." Larsen's figures deliberately recalled the now ubiquitous images disseminated by the international press depicting rows of drowned people enshrouded by Italian authorities in anonymous sheets. 2 The figures were affixed to a wooden platform with ropes and chains, hanging vertically, like macabre pendulums. They occupied a liminal space between surface and depth, like specters at once present and absent, material and fleeting, visible and invisible, fixed and mobile, past and present. The plan for the work, titled End of Dreams, was to keep the forty-eight figures submerged in the sea for four months, incurring a degradation of their form and the growth of subaqueous forms of life-a filmy coating of algae, a host for other marine organisms (Fig. 1).
Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Na... more Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Nazi Germany. For many years, pervading much intellectual and public discourse was the contention that, prior to the great influx of racialized migrants in the mid-1980s, and with the exception of the Fascist period, there simply was no race (racialized others, racist intolerance, etc.) in Italy. Vital Subjects examines cultural production—literature, sociology and public health discourse, and early film—from the years between Unification and the end of the First World War (ca. 1860 and 1920) in order to explore how race and colonialism were integral to modern Italian national culture, rather than a marginal afterthought or a Fascist aberration. Drawing from theorizations of biopolitics—a term coined by political theorists from Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and numerous others to address how the life and productivity of the population emerges as a distinctively modern political question—the book repositions discourses of race and colonialism with regard to post-Unification national culture. Vital Subjects reads cultural texts in a biopolitical key, arguing that the tenor of racial discourse was overwhelmingly positive, focusing on making Italians as vital subjects--robust, vigorous, well-nourished, and (re)productive.
Art in America, 2020
The article reports that screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, the chief theorist of Italian neorealism ... more The article reports that screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, the chief theorist of Italian neorealism in the early 1950 has always felt the ‘natural' and practically inevitable necessity of inserting a story into reality in order to make it thrilling and spectacular. Topics include examines that Fascist cultural policy had proscribed depictions of class consciousness, material struggle, or poverty, dismissing these as heretical and "Bolshevik."
In her monograph L’Africa in casa. Propaganda e cultura coloniale nell’Italia fascista, Valeria D... more In her monograph L’Africa in casa. Propaganda e cultura coloniale nell’Italia fascista, Valeria Deplano offers a detailed and concise history of colonial cultural institutions during the fascist ve...
Postcolonial Studies, 2015
Semestrale Di Studi E Ricerche Di Geografia, Nov 16, 2014
Quaderni D Italianistica, Mar 30, 2014
Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcoloni... more Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcolonial, global and transnational Italian studies and aim to set a new agenda for academic research on what constitutes Italian culture today. As such, it will move beyond the physical borders of the peninsula as well as identifying existing or evolving transnational presences within the nation in order to relect the vibrant and complex make-up of today's global Italy. Privileging a cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on the analysis of textual production, the series focuses primarily on the contemporary context but will also include work on earlier periods informed by current postcolonial/transnational methodology.
Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcoloni... more Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcolonial, global and transnational Italian studies and aim to set a new agenda for academic research on what constitutes Italian culture today. As such, it will move beyond the physical borders of the peninsula as well as identifying existing or evolving transnational presences within the nation in order to relect the vibrant and complex make-up of today's global Italy. Privileging a cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on the analysis of textual production, the series focuses primarily on the contemporary context but will also include work on earlier periods informed by current postcolonial/transnational methodology.
In June of 2014, after a month-long residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwa... more In June of 2014, after a month-long residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwatz, sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen dropped forty-eight figures evocative of human shapes, wrapped in concrete canvas resembling funerary sheets and body bags into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the southern Italian port town of Pizzo Calabro (Calabria). The human forms were to serve as markers of the thousands of unidentified dead bodies washing up on Europe’s shores and making of the Mediterranean what some have ominously referred to as a vast necro-region, or a watery mass grave, rather than a source of life.
Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically eng... more Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically engaged Italian films about immigration. Because the film invites viewers to consider not only fascist Italy’s colonial occupation of Albania under Mussolini, but also parallels between Italian emigration to the Americas in the early 20th century and Albanian immigration to Italy in the second half of the same century, Lamerica is often considered among Italy’s earliest postcolonial films. To call a film produced in the mid-1990’s one of Italy’s ‘earliest’ postcolonial films will understandably give some readers pause, as such a designation calls forth one of the enduring topoi of colonial and postcolonial Italy--that of belatedness. If Italy arrived ‘late’ to the colonial scramble for Africa and to the conquest of modernity that African colonization promised, so too has Italy arrived ‘late’ to its postcoloniality. This essay takes up temporality as one of the key rhetorical figures of (post)colonial Italian cultural production through a reading of structures of racialization in Lamerica. Amelio’s film asks us to consider not only the role of history in shaping national identity, but also how racialization is carried out in the absence of what Fanon memorably called the “racial epidermal schema.” Amelio’s film demonstrates how postcolonial racial representation is carried out through two mechanisms: biopolitical discourse about hygiene and contagious disease and the ascription of divergent temporalities to national populations. The film shuttles back and forth between these modes in order to ponder the mobility or fixity of racialized national identity in the era(s) of mass global migrations.
An international symposium. Organized by the Center for African Studies, the Center for European ... more An international symposium. Organized by the Center for African Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the Department of Italian at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean Migration Crisis
Friday, October 16, 2015
9:30am-6pm
College Avenue Campus
Routledge, Jul 24, 2015
Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically eng... more Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically engaged Italian films about immigration. Because the film invites viewers to consider not only fascist Italy’s colonial occupation of Albania under Mussolini, but also parallels between Italian emigration to the Americas in the early 20th century and Albanian immigration to Italy in the second half of the same century, Lamerica is often considered among Italy’s earliest postcolonial films. To call a film produced in the mid-1990’s one of Italy’s ‘earliest’ postcolonial films will understandably give some readers pause, as such a designation calls forth one of the enduring topoi of colonial and postcolonial Italy--that of belatedness. If Italy arrived ‘late’ to the colonial scramble for Africa and to the conquest of modernity that African colonization promised, so too has Italy arrived ‘late’ to its postcoloniality. This essay takes up temporality as one of the key rhetorical figures of (post)colonial Italian cultural production through a reading of structures of racialization in Lamerica. Amelio’s film asks us to consider not only the role of history in shaping national identity, but also how racialization is carried out in the absence of what Fanon memorably called the “racial epidermal schema.” Amelio’s film demonstrates how postcolonial racial representation is carried out through two mechanisms: biopolitical discourse about hygiene and contagious disease and the ascription of divergent temporalities to national populations. The film shuttles back and forth between these modes in order to ponder the mobility or fixity of racialized national identity in the era(s) of mass global migrations.
California Italian Studies
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. T... more Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. Arundati Roy Crisis, Contagion, and Care Contagion has perhaps never before preoccupied all corners of the world, all at once, as it has for the past two years and counting. The "virus that knows no borders" has erected palpable ones around all manner of human activity in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19: from the oft-photographed shower curtain hugs or at-the-window visits between elderly people and their loved ones at the outset of the pandemic, to "shutdowns" that confined the privileged classes to their home offices and computer screens (Fogu, Hom, Ruberto 2019, 3). At the same time, ostensibly prophylactic border closures from countries where the outbreak raged have "mix[ed] up medical and political quarantines" and revealed the ambivalent boundaries between politics and science (Ticktin 2020). The death drive that has long haunted neoliberal governance has come starkly to the fore: people deemed essential to the economy have been revealed to be disposable, forced to choose between life and livelihood. Indeed, for communities of color the world over, livelihood has become a tragic oxymoron, insofar as protecting "a means of securing the necessities of life," as the New Oxford American Dictionary defines it, entails accepting elevated levels of risk to one's health. The languages of health and well-being have shuttled back and forth between biological bodies and economic ones, as the so-called health of the economy requires the sacrifice of human life, its exposure to viral contact and contagion. Yet for all of the boundaries and fissures it has brought into stark relief-from centuries of systemic racism and the brutality of border regimes, to economic inequality, distinctions between "essential" and "non-essential" work, between self and other-the very nature of a pandemic has reminded us of our shared vulnerability, creating an opening that in early 2020 made the waters
Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts... more Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses shaped the "making" of Italians as modern political subjects in the years between its administrative unification (1861–1870) and the end of the First World War (1919). The book includes readings of texts by Italian thinkers such as Leopoldo Franchetti and Paolo Mantegazza and it offers new readings of well- and lesser-known texts by a writer who has become Italy's most infamous precursor to Mussolini: poet, novelist, and political provocateur Gabriele D'Annunzio. Vital Subjects concludes with an original analysis of an early film that figures prominently in the history of cinema: Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 silent film Cabiria— produced in the wake of the Italian invasion of Libya (1911–12) and celebrating ancient Roman ...
California Italian Studies, 2017
In June of 2014, Danish sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, after a monthlong ... more In June of 2014, Danish sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, after a monthlong residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwatz, submerged forty-eight figures evocative of human shapes, wrapped in concrete canvas resembling funerary sheets and body bags, into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the southern Italian port town of Pizzo (Calabria). 1 The human forms were meant to serve as markers for the thousands of unidentified dead refugees and asylum seekers washing up on Italy's shores, making the Mediterranean into what some have ominously dubbed a vast "necroregion." Larsen's figures deliberately recalled the now ubiquitous images disseminated by the international press depicting rows of drowned people enshrouded by Italian authorities in anonymous sheets. 2 The figures were affixed to a wooden platform with ropes and chains, hanging vertically, like macabre pendulums. They occupied a liminal space between surface and depth, like specters at once present and absent, material and fleeting, visible and invisible, fixed and mobile, past and present. The plan for the work, titled End of Dreams, was to keep the forty-eight figures submerged in the sea for four months, incurring a degradation of their form and the growth of subaqueous forms of life-a filmy coating of algae, a host for other marine organisms (Fig. 1).
Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Na... more Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Nazi Germany. For many years, pervading much intellectual and public discourse was the contention that, prior to the great influx of racialized migrants in the mid-1980s, and with the exception of the Fascist period, there simply was no race (racialized others, racist intolerance, etc.) in Italy. Vital Subjects examines cultural production—literature, sociology and public health discourse, and early film—from the years between Unification and the end of the First World War (ca. 1860 and 1920) in order to explore how race and colonialism were integral to modern Italian national culture, rather than a marginal afterthought or a Fascist aberration. Drawing from theorizations of biopolitics—a term coined by political theorists from Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and numerous others to address how the life and productivity of the population emerges as a distinctively modern political question—the book repositions discourses of race and colonialism with regard to post-Unification national culture. Vital Subjects reads cultural texts in a biopolitical key, arguing that the tenor of racial discourse was overwhelmingly positive, focusing on making Italians as vital subjects--robust, vigorous, well-nourished, and (re)productive.
Art in America, 2020
The article reports that screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, the chief theorist of Italian neorealism ... more The article reports that screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, the chief theorist of Italian neorealism in the early 1950 has always felt the ‘natural' and practically inevitable necessity of inserting a story into reality in order to make it thrilling and spectacular. Topics include examines that Fascist cultural policy had proscribed depictions of class consciousness, material struggle, or poverty, dismissing these as heretical and "Bolshevik."
In her monograph L’Africa in casa. Propaganda e cultura coloniale nell’Italia fascista, Valeria D... more In her monograph L’Africa in casa. Propaganda e cultura coloniale nell’Italia fascista, Valeria Deplano offers a detailed and concise history of colonial cultural institutions during the fascist ve...
Postcolonial Studies, 2015
Semestrale Di Studi E Ricerche Di Geografia, Nov 16, 2014
Quaderni D Italianistica, Mar 30, 2014
Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcoloni... more Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcolonial, global and transnational Italian studies and aim to set a new agenda for academic research on what constitutes Italian culture today. As such, it will move beyond the physical borders of the peninsula as well as identifying existing or evolving transnational presences within the nation in order to relect the vibrant and complex make-up of today's global Italy. Privileging a cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on the analysis of textual production, the series focuses primarily on the contemporary context but will also include work on earlier periods informed by current postcolonial/transnational methodology.
Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcoloni... more Transnational Italian Cultures will publish the best research in the expanding ield of postcolonial, global and transnational Italian studies and aim to set a new agenda for academic research on what constitutes Italian culture today. As such, it will move beyond the physical borders of the peninsula as well as identifying existing or evolving transnational presences within the nation in order to relect the vibrant and complex make-up of today's global Italy. Privileging a cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on the analysis of textual production, the series focuses primarily on the contemporary context but will also include work on earlier periods informed by current postcolonial/transnational methodology.
In June of 2014, after a month-long residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwa... more In June of 2014, after a month-long residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwatz, sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen dropped forty-eight figures evocative of human shapes, wrapped in concrete canvas resembling funerary sheets and body bags into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the southern Italian port town of Pizzo Calabro (Calabria). The human forms were to serve as markers of the thousands of unidentified dead bodies washing up on Europe’s shores and making of the Mediterranean what some have ominously referred to as a vast necro-region, or a watery mass grave, rather than a source of life.
Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically eng... more Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica is often considered one the first in a line of politically engaged Italian films about immigration. Because the film invites viewers to consider not only fascist Italy’s colonial occupation of Albania under Mussolini, but also parallels between Italian emigration to the Americas in the early 20th century and Albanian immigration to Italy in the second half of the same century, Lamerica is often considered among Italy’s earliest postcolonial films. To call a film produced in the mid-1990’s one of Italy’s ‘earliest’ postcolonial films will understandably give some readers pause, as such a designation calls forth one of the enduring topoi of colonial and postcolonial Italy--that of belatedness. If Italy arrived ‘late’ to the colonial scramble for Africa and to the conquest of modernity that African colonization promised, so too has Italy arrived ‘late’ to its postcoloniality. This essay takes up temporality as one of the key rhetorical figures of (post)colonial Italian cultural production through a reading of structures of racialization in Lamerica. Amelio’s film asks us to consider not only the role of history in shaping national identity, but also how racialization is carried out in the absence of what Fanon memorably called the “racial epidermal schema.” Amelio’s film demonstrates how postcolonial racial representation is carried out through two mechanisms: biopolitical discourse about hygiene and contagious disease and the ascription of divergent temporalities to national populations. The film shuttles back and forth between these modes in order to ponder the mobility or fixity of racialized national identity in the era(s) of mass global migrations.
An international symposium. Organized by the Center for African Studies, the Center for European ... more An international symposium. Organized by the Center for African Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the Department of Italian at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean Migration Crisis
Friday, October 16, 2015
9:30am-6pm
College Avenue Campus
Il corpo della nazione. Smembramenti e trasformazioni Razza e (ri)produttività. Per una lettura b... more Il corpo della nazione. Smembramenti e trasformazioni Razza e (ri)produttività. Per una lettura biopolitica della razza nell'Italia postunitaria e contemporanea Nel dicembre 1887, il primo ministro Francesco Crispi, riferendosi alla condizione degli emigranti, introdusse la prima legislazione sull'emigrazione con le seguenti parole:
Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Na... more Since World War II, Italy has struggled to recast both its colonial past and its alliance with Nazi Germany. For many years, pervading much intellectual and public discourse was the contention that, prior to the great influx of racialized migrants in the mid-1980s, and with the exception of the Fascist period, there simply was no race (racialized others, racist intolerance, etc.) in Italy. Vital Subjects examines cultural production—literature, sociology and public health discourse, and early film—from the years between Unification and the end of the First World War (ca. 1860 and 1920) in order to explore how race and colonialism were integral to modern Italian national culture, rather than a marginal afterthought or a Fascist aberration. Drawing from theorizations of biopolitics—a term coined by political theorists from Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and numerous others to address how the life and productivity of the population emerges as a distinctively modern political question—the book repositions discourses of race and colonialism with regard to post-Unification national culture. Vital Subjects reads cultural texts in a biopolitical key, arguing that the tenor of racial discourse was overwhelmingly positive, focusing on making Italians as vital subjects--robust, vigorous, well-nourished, and (re)productive.
Art in America, 2020
Filmmakers around the world have adapted the stripped-down style of postwar Italian cinema to cre... more Filmmakers around the world have adapted the stripped-down style of postwar Italian cinema to create visual languages suited to local stories of postcolonial life and struggle.