"Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood", by Rosario Forlenza and Bjorn Thomassen (original) (raw)
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During the 1990s, concern over the future of Italy, fuelled by the threat of separatist movements and increasingly evident social fragmentation, focused attention once more on the question of national identity.1 As cinema played its part in this debate, the question arises as to how it was represented on screen. In line with a trend often observed in contemporary European filmmaking, spatial representation proved to be an effective way of exploring the theme of identity.2 In this, a familiar element is to be found in the road movie tradition, in which the protagonists' self-awareness and the achievement of personal goals come about by means of a journey through many obstacles.3
Modern Italy, 2017
Nel presente saggio esamino le modalità attraverso cui scrittrici di seconda generazione come Igiaba Scego e Ubax Cristina Ali Farah rappresentano i cambiamenti sociali che avvengono quotidianamente nell’Italia postcoloniale attraverso nuove articolazioni spaziali. Queste autrici propongono nuove rappresentazioni di soggetti migranti e postcoloniali, e lo fanno popolando le proprie narrazioni e i paesaggi urbani in cui tali narrazioni si articolano con personaggi migranti e di seconda generazione che non sono in alcun modo conformi al modello di indesiderabilità attraverso cui questi soggetti sono tradizionalmente rappresentanti. Attraverso una rimappatura degli spazi urbani come luoghi di significazione culturale e una messa in discussione delle tradizionali articolazioni del potere in ambienti urbani e metropolitani, scrittrici e scrittori di seconda generazione decostruiscono le rappresentazioni della popolazione italiana come omogenea e dei migranti come soggetti pericolosi e/o vittimizzati, assolutamente privi di agency. In questo processo di rimappatura dello spazio locale, che conduce ad una rimappatura anche dello spazio nazionale, si intersecano questioni di genere, razza, postcolonialità, cittadinanza e appartenenza.
Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. The paper, drawing upon the situation of the so-called baraccati in post-WWII Rome as presented in Vittorio De Sica’s movie The roof (1956), aims to present how migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Τhe cinematic representations of working women in the Italian Neorealist cinema reveal filmmakers’ perception of a newly conceptualized Italy. Τhe roles of baraccati and women in Italian Neorealist cinema function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain in order to reflect on the intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective is to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Saskia Sassen’s understanding of immigration as “a process constituted by human beings with will and agency, with multiple identities and life trajectories beyond the fact of being seen, defined and categorised as immigrants for the purposes of the receiving polity, economy and society” is useful in order to better grasp the impact of migration on the status of public space, leading to a more open conception of it and to the reconceptualization of the notion of place beyond traditional definitions, while challenging the boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention is paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. By the 1990s, research started emphasizing migration as a gendered process, promoting gender as a dynamic and constitutive element of migration and immigrant integration. This paper seeks to present how these intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies can provide a new reading of the concepts of domesticity, citizenship and displacement in Italian Neorealist cinema.
Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. The paper, drawing upon the situation of the so-called baraccati in post-WWII Rome as presented in Vittorio De Sica’s movie The roof (1956), aims to present how migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Τhe cinematic representations of working women in the Italian Neorealist cinema reveal filmmakers’ perception of a newly conceptualized Italy. Τhe roles of baraccati and women in Italian Neorealist cinema function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain in order to reflect on the intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective is to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Saskia Sassen’s understanding of immigration as “a process constituted by human beings with will and agency, with multiple identities and life trajectories beyond the fact of being seen, defined and categorised as immigrants for the purposes of the receiving polity, economy and society” is useful in order to better grasp the impact of migration on the status of public space, leading to a more open conception of it and to the reconceptualization of the notion of place beyond traditional definitions, while challenging the boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention is paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. By the 1990s, research started emphasizing migration as a gendered process, promoting gender as a dynamic and constitutive element of migration and immigrant integration. This paper seeks to present how these intersections between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies can provide a new reading of the concepts of domesticity, citizenship and displacement in Italian Neorealist cinema.
Modern Italy, 2020
attended by more than twenty postgraduate students and other young researchers from a number of Italian and European universities. The participants were able to enrich their own research perspectives during in-depth discussions with both the discussants and the audience. They benefited from two keynote addresses, the first by Emanuela Scarpellini on 'Italian Food in a Globalized World', and the second by Massimo Baioni, on 'The Risorgimento and the Great War in the public discourse of Fascist Italy', as well as two workshops on digital history, the first run by Fabio Guidali, the second jointly by Mirco Carrattieri and Igor Pizzirusso. The essays collected in this special issue are the result of the elaboration of a number of the papers presented in Milan. Without doubt, Modern Italy is the appropriate forum for their publication. The articles are not intended to be representative of the current state of research in Italian studies but a contribution to it. Many of the papers presented deserved publication, but are not included in this special issue because they fell somewhat outside the topic we have chosen to evaluate, which goes under the title Italians beyond Italy/Italy beyond Italians: Transnational Cultural Strategies and the Construction of Identities. From all these articles, there emerge many questions directly linked to the issue of Italian identity. Among them we would like to underline the common theme of 'popularity', both in terms of cultural achievement, whether commercial success, or effective diffusion, or wide engagement with a vision or project, and in terms of the willingness of those who create a cultural product to disseminate it to a wider public. Based on a legacy of cultural practices and symbols, together with physical monuments and tangible structures, cultural identity involves much more than political culture, embracing as it does the whole range of cultural production, whether literature, or architecture, or publicity, even the art of food. The issue of fascist cultural diplomacy brings together the articles by Simone Muraca and Fabio Ferrarini, which between them study the effort to disseminate fascist culture in Portugal and Finland, providing the opportunity for a fruitful comparison between two very different realities. Muraca bases his case study on the reconstruction of the history of Lisbon's Italian Cultural Institute. By examining published literature, documents from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a number of private archives, the author uses cultural diplomacy in Portugal as an entry point to the broader debate on the subject. The study of Lisbon's Italian Cultural Institute illuminates both the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of fascist political culture. The organisation