Brioni, Cecilia and Simone Brioni (2018) "Transnational ‘Italian’ Stardom: Lara Saint Paul and the Performativity of Race", Italian Studies 73.3 (original) (raw)
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Transnational ‘Italian’ Stardom: Lara Saint Paul and the Performativity of Race
Italian Studies
This article aims to contribute to the debate about critical race studies in the Italian context-and especially in the 1960s and the 1970s-by focusing on the construction and negotiation of race in the career of the prominent Italian meticcio singer, television host and producer Silvana Areggasc Savorelli, also known as Tanya from 1960 to 1966 and Lara Saint Paul from 1967 onwards. Through an examination of Savorelli's career as a singer, television host and Italian diva, this article shows how the meanings of Savorelli's meticcio body have been constantly adapting to the shifting perceptions of blackness in Italy and other Western societies. Lara Saint Paul's media representations illustrate a change in the social construction of Italianness in terms of race from the early 1960s to the early 2000s.
ARTICLES / SAGGI SILENCE AND RECKONING -AFRICAN-ITALIANS IN POPULAR CULTURE
Sommario Questo articolo sostiene che la decolonizzazione degli studi di italianistica può avvenire attraverso l'identificazione e la critica di modi scontati di pensare al razzismo, al colonialismo e all'italianità. L'articolo discute inoltre il potere razziale moderno-coloniale nell'immaginario quotidiano e popolare e alcuni dei modi in cui viene contestato. L'articolo esamina le rappresentazioni dominanti dell'italianità e della negritudine e le auto-rappresentazioni degli italiani afrodiscendenti, ad esempio nella serie Netflix Zero. L'autore incoraggia gli studiosi d'italianistica a concentrarsi sulla relazionalità del luogo e sulla complessità di ciò che significa essere italiani. Il presente articolo afferma che la decolonizzazione comporta la necessità di fare i conti con il passato del paese e di interrogare le relazioni di potere.
Italian Studies, 2016
My article focuses on particular forms of exoticizing discursive practices produced and reproduced in Italy through the most popular and transgenerational media. Three television shows will be taken into consideration: Licia Colò’s Alle falde del Kilimangiaro, Bruno Vespa’s Porta a porta, and Alfonso Signorini’s Kalispéra!. The latter two are particularly well-known for their coverage of Berlusconi’s sex scandal involving the Italian-Moroccan under-age Karima el Mahroug alias Ruby ‘Rubacuori’. Alle falde del Kilimangiaro will be contrasted with the ferocious attacks in the media (video and newspaper) by a number of political forces and cultural opinion makers against former Italian Minister for Integration Cécile Kyenge (2013). This discussion will also analyze the discursive strategies employed by both El Mahroug and Kyenge against the exotizing and openly inferiorizing discourses built around them.
This special issue arises from the papers delivered at the two-day conference in September 2011 entitled Desiring Divas: the Diva in Modern Italian Culture (Downing College, Cambridge, organized by Katharine Mitchell and Catherine O’Rawe). The conference papers offered an important opportunity to rethink the Italian diva’s historical and critical contexts, and to interrogate received views of the figure as an archetypal and transhistorical one. The ‘Diva in Modern Italian Culture’ responds to a growth of recent research into the phenomenon of the diva in the humanities, and focuses upon the unique case of the Italian diva, which emerged during the course of the conference. Italian diva culture deserves attention in its own right, for it offered a model for diva self-fashioning in other national contexts. And yet, despite this legacy, its significance and specificity risk being overlooked: scholarship on the phenomenon of the diva in literature, theatre, and opera has not discussed in any depth the ‘Italian case’, nor has there been a collective volume on the topic with an Italian perspective. In this special issue, we hope to demonstrate both the wealth of diva case studies presented at the conference, as well as the legacies, perspectives, and themes that make this such a rich area for present and future investigation.
Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives, 2021
In 2006 Italian-Egyptian rapper Amir Issaa released ‘Straniero nella mia nazione,’ considered the first hip hop song to expose the predicament of second-generations, children of immigrants who are born or raised in Italy but not considered fully Italian regardless of their citizenship status. A decade later, in 2015, Italian-Nigerian Tommy Kuti adapted Amir’s concept proudly and playfully rapping that he was not ‘straniero,’ a foreigner in Italy, but rather ‘stra-nero,’ super-black, thus fully embracing and flaunting his blackness as distinctive of his Italian identity. This essay considers the work of Afro-Italian hip hop artists and their increasing visibility on the Italian national music scene. Quite aware of the perils and potentials of their diversity, today’s rappers—who include power players like Italian-Tunisian Ghali—capitalize on it, while also moving beyond restrictive categorizations. We argue that their work is related as much to recent international music trends as to an Italian lineage that can be traced back to historic groups like Sangue Misto, all the while challenging traditional notions of Italianness and re-imagining a new nation-hood. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781683933144/Contemporary-Italian-Diversity-in-Critical-and-Fictional-Narratives
Being Italian: the peculiar journey of blackness
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2023
Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Italian, in the face of denial, diversion, and an insistence on whiteness as the measure of inclusion, and humanity. Drawing on Allan Pred's work on racist geographies of the everyday and taken-for-granted in Sweden, I advance the concepts of B/black spaces and relational places to approach to the study of identity, belonging, and place in Black Europe, with a focus on Italy. Black and African Italians from diverse origins and generations are asserting their belonging in Italy. Pred's work on every day situated practices, power relations, taken-for-granted knowledge, and silences, is useful to contemporary scholarship in Black geographies, antiracist and decolonial scholarship. Pred's holistic studies of modernity and the impacts of global political and economic transformations in lived experiences demonstrate the centrality of racism to national societies and cultures. His work is valuable to scholars of modern Western colonial systems of knowledge production and power, advancing insights and encouraging new directions based on abundant, ordinary yet silenced everyday realities and experiences. This paper expands on Pred's work through an analysis of Blackness, place and belonging in Italy, offering an approach to the study of African Diaspora in Europe.
Contemporary discourse about the figure of the velina, or showgirl, in Italy rotates around, amongst other things, a misreading of (youthful) female spectatorship practices (O'Rawe), culture and ambitions, a profound confusion about how to read narrative film and television, and a fundamental resistance to 'popular' taste (O'Leary). I will examine how contemporary popular cinema in Italy has handled the figure of the velina through the recurrent trope of the audition, suggesting that it mobilizes a contradictory set of messages about the female body and agency that complicate the often Manichean discourses circulating in the current debate, and that it intersects with the debates about the 'sexualization of culture' and postfeminism in the Anglophone context. Developing my earlier work in this area, I will show, through reflection upon the theoretical prisms of class, taste, genre, and dance how popular Italian cinema nuances the often polarized velina debate.
Research in African Literatures, 2010
This article discusses the emergence of a postcolonial Italian discourse through the analysis and comparison of two cultural productions belonging to two distinct historical periods. Lunga vita all'albero (Long Live the Tree, 1990) by the Ravenna-based interethnic company Teatro delle Albe is a play produced in the early stages of senegalese immigration to Italy that imagines a shared history of resistance—anticolonial and antifascist—led by women. The more recent Regina di fiori e di perle (Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 2007) by Italian-Ethiopian writer Gabriella Ghermandi engages similar issues, but places the history of Ethiopian resistance to Italian colonialism, still a disavowed question in Italian history, at its center. Both works establish transnational connections and identifications across cultures and defamil-iarize taken-for-granted identities, stereotypes, and beliefs, particularly about African women, which continue to plague Italian public discourse.