Seminars

In honor of the 80th anniversary of Italian Liberation Day, April 25th, 1945, the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Italian Studies presents a special panel and conversation. Resisting Silence: Unveiling the Legacy of the Italian Resistance aims to explore the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Italian antifascism. By bringing together scholars, activists, and community members, we will foster meaningful discussions that illuminate the lessons of resilience and social justice.

Thousands of books have been written on Hiv/Aids. However, only a few adopt a historical approach, and even fewer focus on the Italian case, concentrating mostly on the 1980s- 90s. My paper is the first historical reconstruction of Hiv/Aids in Italy from the early 1980s to the present. As most interdisciplinary studies have stressed the crucial role of mass media in Inventing AIDS as a social phenomenon, I use UNAIDS and ISS reports to reconstruct the evolution of the epidemic and focus on discursive practices as multiple and ever-changing integral parts of the phenomenon itself, during the crisis as well as in pre/post-emergency phases. I combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of a wide range of sources (press, TV, social media, movies, songs, comics, manuals, etc.) in order to ascertain how narratives: a) generate hysteria or deny the disease; b) prompt, hamper or influence political/regulatory action; c) shape or contrast stigma and discrimination; d) link Hiv/Aids to, or separate it from, other issues; e) popularize the ‘Aids-related art’; f) shape the memory of the pandemic. On the one hand, mass media discourses on Hiv/Aids are analyzed to ascertain if/how they differ -synchronically and diachronically - according to: epidemiological data; medical progress; media; broadcast areas; domestic/international political framework; authors’ political leanings, religious faith, socio-economic status, gender, sexual orientations, and involvement in the crisis. On the other hand, ego-documents, oral sources, and letters to newspapers are examined to ascertain the differential ‘media effects’ on different individuals/groups and how reciprocity and ideology of consensus let audiences contribute to selecting and shaping Hiv/Aids-related news. I pay particular attention to transnational transfers, circulations, hybridizations, and the comparison between the Italian case and other contexts. This enables me not only to avoid the risk of an overly circumscribed analysis but also to answer some crucial questions: to what extent are the discourses on Hiv/Aids in Italy influenced by foreign ones? How do the Italian discourses contribute to shaping transnational narratives? Do they have peculiar features, linked to epidemiological data, pre-existing narrative patterns, and political/conceptual frameworks (previous emergencies, the influence of the Catholic Church, the weakness of the LGBTQI+ community, Italy’s geopolitical role, and the characteristics of Italian politics, media system, and society)?

In the 1950s, using the language of human and civil rights, homosexuals in Europe and North America began to coordinate their activities by organizing transnational homophile networks. Homophiles spoke the language of respectability and tried to avoid the sexualization of their identities. However, reading the correspondence between a few Italian and Swiss homophiles involved in transnational projects, it is possible to find documents not only about the purchase and exchange of pornographic images and drawings, but also about photo shoots with young Italian hustlers and the organization of erotic weekends for men only at Lake Garda. By focusing in particular on the correspondence between the Italian Bernardino del Boca and the French editor of Der Kreis, Charles Welti, this article aims to sexualize the "homophile international". It will problematize our understanding of "homophile respectability," reveal the complicated attitudes of some homophiles toward intergenerational sex, and expose the personal struggles of homophiles to find a balance between homoerotic desires, sexual urges, and the need to maintain an upright image.

Ruins, excavated artifacts, and other vestiges of built environments from the distant past hold a special grip over the collective imaginaries of the essence of a place. Particularly in contested lands, material remnants serve as the foundations of claims to medieval, ancient, or prehistoric indigeneity that can, in turn, advance political agendas of territorial legitimacy. Archaeologists, conservators, and historians of architecture, as the gatekeepers of these artifacts and the craftsmen of their narratives, play a central role in the formulation and verification of such imagined essences. Supposedly objective arbiters, they often subtly assist in manipulating the perennially renegotiated frameworks of territorial rights. Italian archaeologists and architectural historians played vital roles in crafting the Italian Fascist imperium. These practices are productively complicated by the character they take in irredentist territories, where the place was, paradoxically, both motherland and object of imperial aspiration. Drawing on four cases from the 1920s and 30s in tentatively acquired Italian locales, this talk analyzes how professionals conceptualized and materially manipulated architectural and archaeological evidence in order to stake historical claims to land over which their state sought to consolidate control. They effortfully parsed racialized distinctions among Roman, Italian, Balkan, Byzantine, and other categories, drawing a distant past into the fraught present. In one case, a priest and a preservationist are in a battle, mediated by the young Fascist state, over the conservation of the Euphrasian Basilica in Parenzo (Poreć), an important church built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. In another case, the post-WWI Italian occupying authorities abscond with archaeological artifacts excavated from an ancient Liburnian settlement 50 km inland from the Italian- claimed Dalmatian coast. This removal is challenged vociferously on the international stage, with appeals to national self-determination and international norms, by the director of the region’s preservation office, who is also a priest and art historian. In the third example, an Italian Byzantinist and Fascist Party operative progressively rebels against his profession’s norms to frame Balkan Byzantine architecture as a Roman in its essence. The final example is set on the now-Croatian Island of Lastovo (Lagosta). On this militarily strategic island located in the middle of the Adriatic, with sightlines to both the Balkan and Apennine peninsulas, Italian archaeologists worked in tandem with economic planners, agronomists, and military builders to strategically claim the island as Italian. These micro-historical cases summon far-reaching questions of settler colonialism, the dynamics and categories of imperialism, professional norms in scholarly discourse, the artifice of self-determination and indigeneity, and frameworks of nation-state autonomy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

What is the place of philosophy in a pandemic? In early 2020, a number of thinkers offered answers to this question as the COVID-19 pandemic quickly spread around the world. Giorgio Agamben was one of the first to respond: he started writing about the subject in February 2020, just as Italy was seeing a staggering rise in transmissions of the virus and deaths from the illness it causes. Agamben soon found himself in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Sergio Benvenuto, and others. Equally swift were the efforts to cement these interventions as formal contributions to their field: in the spring of the same year, a collection of these articles appeared in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis under the title “Coronavirus and Philosophers.” As the journal’s site now explains, they have been removed since being published as part of the 2021 Routledge volume Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society. While Agamben and Esposito contributed to philosophical discourse on COVID-19 almost immediately, these two biopolitical thinkers have been all but silent about HIV/AIDS, perhaps the greatest biomedical disaster of the twentieth century and a pandemic that continues still to claim lives globally in what is now its (at least) fifth decade. This paper takes as its point of departure the missed encounter between HIV/AIDS and Italian biopolitical thought. After interrogating—as Esposito and Timothy Campbell have done—what is Italian about Italian biopolitical thought, I examine the unique contours of HIV/AIDS in Italy, from needle-sharing as a primary means of transmission to the activism of sex workers and LGBT and feminist organizers, as well as factors like changing migration flows and interventions from the Church that have heavily influenced how the virus is seen and understood in the national context.

The proposed paper is part of a broader research project supported by a Marie Curie Global Fellowship, focusing on the international trade of Jewish manuscripts and books among Italy, the United States, and Mandatory Palestine. It specifically explores the diaspora of Jewish manuscripts, early printed books, and entire Judaica collections from Italy. The study analyzes four critical periods in the trade and dispersion of these Italian bibliographic treasures: the emancipation of Italian Jews after the Unification of Italy; the commercial dynamics of Jewish book trade in Italy and its colonies during the Fascist regime; the Nazi occupation and the subsequent looting of Jewish libraries and archives; and finally, the allocation of about 150,000 heirless items (including manuscripts and books) by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in the United States and abroad in the aftermath of WW2. The research questions posed include: why, by the 1920s, were the majority of Jewish manuscripts held globally originating from Italy? What types of manuscripts and books were exported from Italy during the late nineteenth century and the post-war era, and by what means? Who were the primary figures driving the international book trade prior to WW2, thereby aiding both their dispersal and preservation from Nazi looting? Conversely, what became of the collections owned by the Italian Jewish community and private individuals that were raided by the Nazis during their occupation? To explore these issues, the paper will utilize case studies, including those involving Italian specimens and collections housed at Columbia University Libraries and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, will be employed to address these questions. These examples will be informed by an array of sources, such as correspondence between scholars, booksellers, antiquarians, librarians, and collectors; library acquisition records; auction and library catalogs; along with actual specimens of manuscripts and printed books.

In the spring of 1872, a curious pair of writings were printed by the Botta printing house in Turin. One, entitled Il racconto di un guardiano di spiaggia (The Tale of a Beachkeeper) is presented as a free translation of the much more famous Battle of Dorking, published in the UK the previous year by Colonel Chesney; the other, entitled La battaglia di Pinerolo (The Battle of Pinerolo) has the explicit aim of countering Il racconto and its fundamental thesis, namely that Italy is close to be invaded by the French army and doomed to succumb with no chance of victory. Moving from these two publications – part of a European phenomenon which I am currently investigating in view of a forthcoming book – my talk intends to investigate a largely forgotten aspect of the political and cultural history of post-unification Italy, namely the establishment of a culture of invasion that straddled parliamentary debate, pamphletry and the popular novel in Italy and Europe. Until at least the outbreak of the First World War, dozens of novels and short stories dedicated to warning readers of a possible future invasion were published in Italy and abroad. But if in the 1870s, following the British model, the invasion was mostly imagined in terms of a military confrontation between great powers, from the 1890s onwards, the fear of invasion began to intersect with other forms of anxiety, adopting the narrative archetypes of conspiracy fantasies. The external enemy was then replaced by an internal enemy traced according to different archetypes (the Jewish spy, the anarchist terrorist, the infiltrator, the alien immigrant, etc.). By reconstructing the history of the various forms assumed by the fear of invasion in the Italian context in the period between the conquest of Rome and the outbreak of the First World War, my talk thus proposes an original reading of the connection between representations of class and race, on the one hand, and processes of nationalization of the masses, on the other. Furthermore, using sources drawn from popular and mass literature, it will offer an innovative view over the processes of nation building as cooperative processes and not simply as the result of top-down political projects.

In our talk we aim to investigate how Italian political cinema of the long ’68 rendered on screen acts of solidarity towards armed struggled for liberation in the Global South. We borrow the term ‘rendering’ from Jessica Stites Mor, where this notion is defined as “a set of practices of solidarity as a mode of mobilizing a kind of historical agency embedded in cultural forms, visual objects, and texts.” With this principle in mind, we will analyze a set of artifacts engaged in ‘solidarity’ either in the film text itself, in its production history, or in its distribution practices, that bring back to life, render back into being, moments of Italian history that speaks to larger solidarity framework. Taking as our central text Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, we will examine a set of texts that generate a “cinegeography of liberation”, bringing into contact an expanded view into Antonio Gramsci’s Southern Question (Ansano Giannarelli’s Sierra Maestra, 1969), the violent history of Colonialism (Valentino Orsini’s I dannati della terra), Third-Worldism and solidarity (Piero Nelli’s Labanta Negro!) and Lino Del Fra’s and Cecilia Magini’s project in Vietnam). To explore this “cinegeography of liberation” we then aim to briefly map a number of places, practices and discourses where an Italian anticolonial and Third- Worldist cinematic thought emerged: film festivals (Pesaro, Porretta Terme), film schools (Cineteca Nazionale), film magazines and journals (Cinema sessanta, Filmcritica), presence of Third World directors in Italy (such as Fernando Birri and Glauber Rocha in Rome). Our hypothesis is that the combination of the legacy of Neorealism and the importance of the Resistance, a diffuse anticolonial attitude (“Italians have lost their colonies and now they are all anticolonialists”, quipped Simone De Beauvoir), and the strength of Leftist groups made Italy an ideal place for the proliferation of anticolonial films in the long ’68.

From 1964–1965, the Sanremo Music Festival, Italy’s most popular contest dedicated to “la canzone italiana,” required that each song entered into competition be performed once by an Italian musician and once by an international musician (instead of by two Italian musicians). Though this rule was short-lived, it led to a period of several years in which some of the world’s most famous musicians (e.g., Connie Francis, Sonny & Cher, Louis Armstrong) gathered in Sanremo to perform songs written by Italian composers specifically for the Festival, often singing in Italian rather than in their native tongue. The dual Italian-stranieri performances helped Italy to demonstrate its commitment to maintaining healthy international relations (Facci and Soddu 2011). However, due to the participation of non-white (and, specifically, Black) international musicians, these performances also offered an opportunity for Italian audiences to reflect on notions of race, whiteness, italianità, and colonial memory. In this paper, I explore the five-year period from 1964 to 1969 during which some of the most famous Black (American) musicians of the midcentury—Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick, and Wilson Pickett, among others—participated in the Sanremo Music Festival. Drawing on reception history from newspapers and TV magazines, as well as audiovisual recordings, I argue that the Black musicians served, for Italian audiences, as an “Other” against which a (white) musicalità italiana could be defined. Furthermore, I observe how Black American, African (e.g., Les Surfs), and Afro-European (e.g., Shirley Bassey) musicians were received differently by the Italian press in ways that often obscured or negated Italy’s history of colonialism, anti-Black racism in and beyond Italy, and, as was the case for Lara Saint Paul, Afro-Italian musicians’ blackness (Brioni and Brioni 2018). Ultimately, this short-lived phenomenon offers insight into the development and mobilization of Italians’ fetishization of Black musicality in the 1960s and beyond.

Although the story of Italian emigration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is well documented, the experience of children, who made up about 20% of migrants during this period, is largely understudied. This project will focus in part on a group of these migrants known as fanciulli girovaghi, or travelling child musicians, who performed in major European and American cities in the mid to late 19th century. While some children emigrated with their parents, siblings, or relatives, others migrated under the care of agents. Parents signed contracts with agencies that promised to take the children, teach them to play an instrument, and then transport them to cities abroad where they would peddle on the streets for money. Generally originating from poor, agricultural areas of Italy, these children, some as young as six or seven, were visible on the streets of foreign cities. The practice peaked in the decades after Italian unification, largely due to the social and economic circumstances that pushed desperate parents to send their kids abroad in exchange for money. By the end of the century, the practice subsided, coinciding with the publication of stories like Pinocchio, and a growing awareness of the need to protect children to prevent their exploitation both at home and abroad. This study adds to our understanding of Italian migration by considering emigrating children, and demonstrates how the socio-economic problems in post-unification Italy pushed families to contract their young children to questionable agents making false promises. Furthermore, as the emerging Kingdom of Italy attempted to build its reputation among the European powers, poor Italian street performers were a cause of shame and embarrassment and perpetuated images of Italy as impoverished and backwards, a reflection of the shortcomings of the government.

In many histories of the Italian Risorgimento, the principles and practices of international law are overshadowed by great power politics. A string of dramatic international events defined the “Italian question,” from the revolutions of 1820-21 to the start of Italy’s second war of independence in 1859. But the legal implications and consequences of these events often remain obscure. Recent studies of the 1830s and 1840s by Miroslav Šedivý and Sebastiano Granata, among others, reveal a keen awareness of international law among Italy’s established rulers and emerging patriots, in particular a sensitivity to the Italian states’ vulnerability as “secondary powers” in the European state system. Did this Italian mindset continue into the 1850s, across the dramatic divide of the revolutions of 1848-49? In this essay, I look closely at the debate surrounding the British politician William Gladstone’s mobilization of European public opinion against the Bourbon King of Naples, Ferdinand II, and his government. I examine Gladstone’s famous pamphlet, Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government, published in the summer of 1851, but also the many pamphlets written in defense of the Neapolitan government, including four Italian publications. In these Italian texts I find echoes of two themes present in studies of the period before 1848: frustration with a brazen disregard for the common European ‘law of nations,’ and criticism of the arrogance of the great powers, including Britain and France. However, these texts also reveal a growing tension between defense of the established principle of non-intervention and support for intervention on behalf of the “cause of humanity.” Although Gladstone did not call for intervention in 1851, five years later, after the conclusion of the Crimean War, the British and French governments effectively staged a “humanitarian intervention” to force Ferdinand to offer amnesty to a large number of Neapolitan political prisoners.

After World War II, the problem of housing in Italy had reached dramatic proportions. At least six million houses had been either destroyed or damaged during the war causing pressing concerns on rebuilding and the urgent need for dwellings for the poorest population. After years of totalitarianism and oppression, distinguished intellectuals, architects and planners approached housing as a service to the collective; exhibitions and meetings focused on housing after removal and relocation; new experiments joined politics, industry, and architecture and investigated participatory design ideas. Challenging to some extent the interest in Italian housing as mere physical reconstruction, the magazine Casabella Continuità by Ernesto Nathan Rogers became the engine of a new social ferment which explored unexpected and, at times, non-canonical manifestations to rebuilding. This presentation investigates the connections between Casabella Continuità’s research on Indigenous Africa, the magazine’s explorations on alternative reconstruction models, and the broader postwar search for social and political alternatives in the mid-1950s. The seminar also uncovers important tensions that link legacies of dissent to Italian colonization and urbanization in Africa with the refusal of an authoritarian and systemic oppression under the fascist regime. Results illuminate how years of pre-war control and the consequent brutality of the war promoted a culture of openness in Rogers’ postwar magazine which led to the investigation of a multifaceted and polychrome microcosm of alternatives. Presenting itself as a cultural tool for change, Casabella Continuità guided postwar intellectuals in their search for a new building tradition as well as the reformulation of Italy as a democratic country.

I will present the first chapter of my manuscript-in-progress, Industrious Skies: The Chemistry of Fascist Nature The book is a cultural history of Italy’s interwar initiatives to fix atmospheric nitrogen – that is, to take unreactive nitrogen gas from the air for use in fertilizers and explosives.I show that the promise of these technologies—that of making bread from air—defines fascist strategy from the very outset of the regime. The availability of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, explosives, and chemical weapons powered major fascist initiatives, beginning with the Battle for Wheat in 1925, and including the draining of the Pontine Marshes, the demographic campaign, and imperialism. Attending to the materiality of industrial processes and products of nitrogen capture as well as more abstract elemental and atmospheric poetics, my study will offer a new perspective on Italian fascism and will shed light on a critical shift whereby discourses of global scarcity give way to ecological crisis better understood through attention to structural violence and injustice. The chapter focuses on the period between 1919-1925 and draws on research I conducted last semester at the National Archives in College Park, MD, and the Othmer Library of Chemical History in Philadelphia. Declassified reports at the National Archives attest to extensive intelligence collaboration between America, France, and the United Kingdom in efforts implement the German Haber-Bosch process during and just after the war. Italy was left out of this intelligence-sharing and was largely disregarded in reports of national progress toward nitrogen capture. In the pages of the Giornale di chimica industrial e applicata, between 1919-1924, Italian scientists including Giacomo Fauser, Arturo Miolati, and Carlo Toniolo discussed the absence of government investment in fixed nitrogen despite the strategic importance of synthetic fertilizers for the national economy.