Editor’s Introduction, CIS 14.2

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards, the testimonies of and studies on China grew in number in Europe and gave rise to a rich repertoire of historical, travel, memoir, scholarly and diplomatic literature of increasing importance. This surge in information on, communication with and representation of the Chinese world within European opinion continued to intensify at the beginning of the nineteenth century, revealing mainly critical attitudes towards China. This was in contrast with the way, in the seventeenth century and into the middle of the eighteenth, China had been the object of admiration and even of idealization in Europe. How did Italy, from the second half of the eighteenth century, participate in this great European debate over China? The existing literature investigated some eighteenth-century figures but without reconstructing in any comprehensive way the sources and channels through which Italian culture developed an image of China, in a dialogue with European culture. This chapter analyses the way in which Italian culture participated in this European debate, focusing on authors and works from the beginning of the nineteenth century, little considered so far for the reconstruction of this chapter in the history of Italian culture. Early nineteenth-century Italian culture expressed a lively interest in China with various publishing initiatives of a different nature and character. This chapter takes into consideration some of these publications, notably those by Giulio Ferrario, Cesare Cantù, Davide Bertolotti, Giuseppe La Farina, Giandomenico Romagnosi and Onorato Martucci. They allow us to follow the evolution of the vision of China proposed to the Italian reader in the period prior to the appearance of Carlo Cattaneo's and Giuseppe Ferrari's important writings on China, respectively in 1861 and 1865. This contribution is intended to show not just the lively interest towards Chinese history and civilization in Italian culture, in relationship with the most advanced European knowledge on the subject, but also the persistence of the Enlightenment legacy and its contribution to the development of a true global perspective. 1

Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and David Bowie are among three of the most influential figures in twentieth-century popular music and culture, and innumerable scholars and biographers have explored the history of their influence. However, critical historiography reminds us that such scholarship is responsible not just for documenting history but also for producing it. In brief, there is always some kind of logic underwriting these historiographies, drawing boundaries through and around our thinking. In Philosophizing Rock Performance: Dylan, Hendrix, Bowie, Wade Hollingshaus capitalizes on this notion by embracing a set of historiographical logics that re-imagine these three artists. Noting how Dylan, Hendrix, and Bowie first established their reputations amid the anti-establishment sentiments that emerged in Western counties during the 1960s and early 1970s, he connects them with the concurrent formative phase of Continental philosophy in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Rancière, Guy Debord, and Michel Foucault. In Philosophizing Rock Performance, Hollingshaus draws on the work of these latter Continental thinkers to explore how we might otherwise think about Dylan, Hendrix, and Bowie. This work is ideal for those in the fields of music history, performance studies, philosophy, American and European cultural and intellectual history, and critical theory.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (b. 1922–d. 1975) was one of the most important and innovative figures in postwar Italian culture, whose influence, both within Italy and internationally, has continued to grow in the decades since his death. Though his international reputation rests largely on the fame he achieved as a filmmaker in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was equally prolific as a poet, novelist, playwright, film theorist, and literary critic, and, particularly in the latter portion of his career, as a political commentator and controversial public intellectual. He was a national celebrity, despite his uncomfortable “scandalous” pronouncements, who was consistently published and broadcast in Italy’s major media outlets. This eclecticism is reflected as much in Pasolini’s aesthetics—centered on adaptation, analogy, and the reciprocal “contamination” of low and high culture—as in the themes persistently explored in his films and writings. An unorthodox Communist driven by a “desperate love for reality” and a lifelong interest in popular Italian culture (particularly dialectal poetry), Pasolini was also, for example, interested in early Renaissance painting, ancient Greek tragedy, and Baroque music. He wrote novels and made films about prostitution and criminality in the Roman borgate, staged tableaux vivants of Mannerist paintings in a tragicomedy about a starving extra hired to participate in a film about the Deposition, wrote a talking Marxist crow into a picaresque allegory starring Totò, transformed his location-scouting journeys into a series of documentaries about Africa and the Middle East, adapted the Bible, Sophocles, Euripides, the Decameron, the Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, and, for his last film, transposed Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to the Fascist Republic of Salò. Pasolini also a wrote a series of long-disparaged and now increasingly revalued essays on film theory, famously arguing for the conceptual analogy between death and editing and maintaining that cinema is “the written language of reality.” Much of the writing on Pasolini, which, like his own work, is staggering in volume, has been devoted to unraveling the relationships between his many and diverse sources, as well as considering his relevance as a uniquely perceptive and intransigent analyst of the radical transformation of Italian culture and society during the postwar period and the years of the economic miracle. The present article is primarily focused on scholarly discussions of Pasolini’s films and film theory, and for the most part excludes review articles and sources centered on other areas of his work. It also privileges writing available in English, although some of the most important and useful Italian texts, as well as several works in French and Spanish, have been included.

Relevance of the study. Italian culture and art in Odesa, their influence on the city development, the European traditions diffusion in urban planning, education, music and theatre activities have a century-long history. It was interrupted with the World War the First and, subsequently, with decades of the bolsheviks’ dictatorship. Therefore, although brief-lasted, Odessa involvement in the cultural space of Italy during the Romanian occupation of the city in 1941–1944, which took place in Hitler’s and Mussolini’s ideological paradigm of the «new Europe» possessions, became a unique experience of the urban culture traditions revival — primarily, the Italian musical and theatre and instrumental performing arts representation. The purpose of the article is to investigate the forms of Italian culture and art representation in Odesa in the context of the Royal Romania occupation policy implementation, aimed at city population integration into the system of the «Roman world» ideological values under the fascist Italy hegemony. Methodology. The methodological background is due to the interdisciplinary nature of the investigation. The scientific toolkit consists of methods that ensure the reliability of the obtained results and conclusions: source studies (to study the narrative sources, newspaper reports); historical and biographical (to investigate the unknown and little-known Italian artists’ biographies pages and their facts clarification); comparison method (used for the purpose of information contained in documents of personal origin, submitted in newspaper reports, studied in scientific investigations verification); historical-systemic method (to investigate the Romania adaptation model of cultural policy and its changes under Odesa development historical features influence); method of generalization (to reveal the Kingdom of Italy representative institutions cultural and propaganda policy in the city essential characteristics). Results and conclusions. Little-known aspects of Odesa cultural and artistic life during the Romanian occupation of 1941–1944, when the city functioned as Governorate of Transnistria administrative centre, were investigated. In particular, the forms of Italian culture and art representation in the context of the Romanization policy implementation have been identified and described. That policy is proved being the processes of Romanianization component, was implemented by the occupying power exclusively in the field of culture in order to promote «European values», «new European culture», represented by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and royal Romania. The policy of Romanization is revealed to be implemented with the Italian Royal Bureau, later the Italian Institute of Culture in Odesa involvement, by popularizing the Italian language and culture, cinematography, visual and musical arts. The local intelligentsia, including ethnic Italians and their descendants who survived in the Stalinist repressions conditions are shown as the social group targeted by this policy. In practice, that policy was embodied in the Odesa Art Museum exposition designing, the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre repertoire, the Italian language and culture courses deployment, Italian art films and newsreels demonstration, Italian singers and musicians invitation to take part at the local stage performances and to work as conservatory professors. On the basis of the city occupation newspapers publications and diary entries of contemporaries, the influence of representatives of the Italian musical environment occupied Odesa cultural life is shown. In particular, the world-famous singers and musicians such as tenor Tito Schipa’s, singer and film actress Katerina Boratto’s, orchestra conductor Molinari Francesco Pradelli’s, cellist Antonio Yanigro’s, harpist Luigi Magistretti’s scenic activities in the city are highlighted, also the violinist Carlo Felice Chillario’s concert practice and pedagogical efforts are investigated.

Reviewed by: The Nineteenth Century in Odessa: One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794 – 1894) Jarrod Tanny (bio) Anna Makolkin. The Nineteenth Century in Odessa: One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794 – 1894). Edwin Mellen. xx, 230. US$109.95 ‘I was almost tempted to believe that, by some hocus-pocus, we had tumbled on an Italian town,’ marvelled one foreign traveller (Henry Wikoff) to Odessa in 1835, who was dazzled by the balmy climate, neo-classical architecture, abundant delicacies, and the Mediterranean joie de vivre seemingly out of place on the fringes of the barren and frigid Russian Empire. And he was not alone; nineteenth-century visitors and residents alike boasted of Odessa’s uncanny resemblance to an ideal Italian city. In The Nineteenth Century in Odessa: One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794–1894), Anna Makolkin attempts to excavate and document Odessa’s Italian heritage, claiming that this pre-eminent facet of the city’s history has been undeservedly neglected. Makolkin’s monograph is rich with detail and includes dozens of beautiful pictures (many in colour) of the numerous individuals and their great artistic achievements that set the ‘eternal Italian cultural compass of Odessa.’ The genesis of this wondrous ‘citta ideale,’ which Makolkin calls ‘the last Italian colony,’ was the direct result of Catherine the Great’s fervent desire to enlighten Russia through European culture. Italy, Makolkin insists, was the logical fountain of enlightenment for Russia, because Italy was the direct heir to Ancient Rome, a society that embodied all that was good and progressive: urban civility, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and a reverence for learning and the arts. The Italian city-states of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment carried on these traditions, and Catherine, who inherited an isolated empire that knew neither renaissance nor enlightenment, turned to the genius of Italy to build Odessa, [End Page 267] her envisioned oasis of urbanity and intellect. ‘Rome,’ accordingly, ‘begot Odessa,’ and ‘the Italian architects, designers, opera singers, actors, painters, sculptors and impresarios turned Odessa into . . . the “cultural Mecca” of the entire Russian and later Soviet Empire.’ The seven chapters in Makolkin’s book describe the Italians who built, enriched, and beautified Catherine’s city on the sparsely populated Ukrainian steppe. The Neapolitan Giuseppe de Ribas served as the city’s first governor, and through his intricate city planning and his benevolent rule de Ribas set the tone for all the pioneers who followed him. The book’s centrepiece is Odessa’s opera, a cultural edifice revered equally for its architectural beauty and its brilliant performances. For Makolkin, the opera is emblematic of what Odessa represented: an enlightened ‘city-paradise’ improbably located in backward Russia. Although Makolkin presents a critical chapter in Odessa’s history, her work is riddled with methodological problems that undermine the credibility of her argument. She tends to be ahistorical, often discussing events separated by decades within the same paragraph, even though Odessa’s social composition and economy changed fundamentally during the intervening years. More troubling are her many conclusions that are not backed up with sufficient data. For instance, she contends that Italian served as Odessa’s lingua franca in culture and in commerce for much of the nineteenth century, but the only evidence she offers is a quotation from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which was written in the 1820s. Makolkin also presents sweeping generalizations about the mentality of Odessa’s inhabitants, their ‘collective psyche,’ which worshipped ‘Beauty, Music, and Theatre’ and (allegedly) little else. Yet Odessa was also notorious for its smugglers, gangsters, and sailors who filled the subterranean taverns in the city’s port district. How their stories intersected with Odessa’s ‘Italian cultural compass’ has no place in Makolkin’s work. Odessa is eternally Italian for Makolkin, and she denies agency to any other group in shaping the city’s high culture. She argues that ‘none of the later settlers . . . could match the education, taste, and sophistication of Odessa Italians.’ Makolkin ignores the fact that 33% of the city’s inhabitants were Jewish by the late nineteenth century, a vibrant community that...

Only rarely does an academic conference thematize by its organization relationship between political theory and cultural praxis. Juxtaposing theoretical discussions with performances by prominent figures in European minority culture, Cornell conference New Ethnic Minorities in European Culture (February 26-28, 1988) staged a debate on political significance of minority culture in post-WWII Europe. Successive presentations revealed conflicting positions and new insights into European minority culture; occasionally such insights struggled under weight of inadequate cultural-political models. Keynote speaker Stephen Castles presented minority culture as a reflection of political and economic reality, identifying this culture as action that is based on very deprivation of political, civil, and human rights. Castles located force necessary to change oppressive conditions that determine minority existence in political arena: The only real support that people within majority culture can give is to get rid of racist immigration laws, to deal with racism on streets, to deal with racist violence. He continued, the key ... in understanding and relating to these cultural practices is not a cultural key, it's a political one. By prioritizing political in this way, Castles placed minority culture in realm of epiphenomena a characterization many at conference opposed. In fact, other conference presentations questioned Castles's categorization by illustrating primary role cultural activity plays in determining subjective and social reception of minorities in Europe. They revealed that battle for minority self-representation hinges not only upon eliminating material supports of discrimination but also upon wresting suppressed cultural history from control of hegemonic interests.

<p>Subtitling provides scholars and translators alike with the challenge of negotiating meaning across languages and cultures in an extremely limited space. The subtitler faces many restrictions than can severely affect a translation. However, subtitles are central to making films more widely and easily accessible. These difficulties are challenging at the best of times and are compounded by the specific difficulties of translating comedy. Humour is both universal and at the same time culturally specific. Anthropologists, sociologists, literary theorists and scholars have amply demonstrated how deeply intertwined humour, culture, and language are. It is for this reason that the current project will expand on the literature of subtitling humour, applying the relevant theories associated with both subtitling and translating humour to the Italian film classic Fantozzi (1975). The character Ugo Fantozzi has been a cult figure in Italian culture and society since his appearance in Italian cinema and literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the films in particular he has come to represent the average Italian of the post-economic miracle, whose life does not quite match the dreams of wealth and prosperity emphasized by the media. Fantozzi epitomises the average, and while his character has received little academic attention to date more credible academic studies are emerging since the death of his creator, Paolo Villaggio, in 2017. Fantozzi, therefore, provides the perfect cultural product for a discussion of what it means to translate Italian culture and humour, combining this with considerations about the emerging field of translation studies of subtitling. By providing a complete translation of Fantozzi in English, accompanied by a critical commentary, in this thesis I attempt to show how, despite all the restrictions imposed by the field of subtitling, as well as the difficulties of translating humour, a subtitler can still produce well thought out and reliable subtitles that convey the cultural and comedic aspects of film, and more specifically of this beloved Italian icon.</p>

<p>Subtitling provides scholars and translators alike with the challenge of negotiating meaning across languages and cultures in an extremely limited space. The subtitler faces many restrictions than can severely affect a translation. However, subtitles are central to making films more widely and easily accessible. These difficulties are challenging at the best of times and are compounded by the specific difficulties of translating comedy. Humour is both universal and at the same time culturally specific. Anthropologists, sociologists, literary theorists and scholars have amply demonstrated how deeply intertwined humour, culture, and language are. It is for this reason that the current project will expand on the literature of subtitling humour, applying the relevant theories associated with both subtitling and translating humour to the Italian film classic Fantozzi (1975). The character Ugo Fantozzi has been a cult figure in Italian culture and society since his appearance in Italian cinema and literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the films in particular he has come to represent the average Italian of the post-economic miracle, whose life does not quite match the dreams of wealth and prosperity emphasized by the media. Fantozzi epitomises the average, and while his character has received little academic attention to date more credible academic studies are emerging since the death of his creator, Paolo Villaggio, in 2017. Fantozzi, therefore, provides the perfect cultural product for a discussion of what it means to translate Italian culture and humour, combining this with considerations about the emerging field of translation studies of subtitling. By providing a complete translation of Fantozzi in English, accompanied by a critical commentary, in this thesis I attempt to show how, despite all the restrictions imposed by the field of subtitling, as well as the difficulties of translating humour, a subtitler can still produce well thought out and reliable subtitles that convey the cultural and comedic aspects of film, and more specifically of this beloved Italian icon.</p>

The most important result of the official opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF) in January, 1998, was the discovery that the records of the Congregation of the Index are extraordinarily rich. Scholars are now able to follow the deliberations of censors, cardinals, popes, and others, as they debated which authors and books should be prohibited or expurgated, and whether the rules were implemented. This volume of studies by nine well-known Italian historians concentrates on the period 1550-1610, the crucial years in which the indexes of 1559, 1564, and 1596, and the single Roman Index expurgatorius of 1602, were drafted, and conflicts resolved. The use of the chronologically meaningless "early modern" in the title does not reflect the book's content.

Chapter 4 traces the features and channels of the initial appreciation of American literature by Italian intellectuals. The scarce knowledge of the English language among Italians had a direct influence on the discovery of American literature, since French translations regularly acted as a cultural go-between. Even the fact that millions of Italians migrated to the Americas in the decades around the turn of the century did not encourage better knowledge of English. This cultural resistance is also somehow connected to the near-absence of the theme of migration to the USA in the literary production of Italian authors. Despite the fact that millions of Italians were crossing the Atlantic, interest in the language and literature of those distant places and interest in representing the experience of migration remained minimal. The chapter also deals briefly with opera librettos, a genre that showed a similar tension between French and American influence. The final section discusses the interest shown by Italian intellectuals towards American pragmatist philosophy at the turn of the century. This involved a number of key figures in Italian culture, including the future leader of Italian Fascism, Benito Mussolini.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated myth of America that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

One of the most maligned figures of Italian popular culture, the stereotype of the portinaia is that of a nosy, aggressive — and omniscient — figure, perhaps best typified in Ettore Scola's 1972 film, Una giornata particolare, but present throughout modern Italian cultural production. The following essay conducts a study of the figure in two very different early twentieth-century works: Carolina Invernizio's turgid serial novel, La figlia della portinaia (1900) and Ada Negri's evocative memoir, Stella mattutina (1921). In both, the figure of the portinaia — along with the configuration of the space she inhabits, the portineria — becomes a threat to the boundaries of male subjectivity and at the same time a promising site for the formation of a female subject.

Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most famous existential philosophers of the 20th century, is a confirmed atheist. Despite this, she also engages and reassigns faith, that faith that is usually associated with ‘religion,’ and iterates it in the service of her existential ethics. Beauvoir’s ethic is founded in the axiom that ‘I concern others, and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth.’ From this assumption, she articulates the principles for living an ethical life which honours above all the freedom of the other in a world fraught with contingency and ambiguity. In so doing, she enjoins us to undertake our efforts in generosity and risk, in faith toward each other, because only by doing so can we achieve the transcendence given in the existential condition. In this movement, Beauvoir confirms and performs a different reading of religion: religion as the scene of the self and other, of the appeal and response, of the holy and the faithful, which constitutes the history of European civilization. Following a certain thread in the discourse on religion given in Jacques Derrida and Michel de Certeau, this study proposes a theoretical apparatus for ‘religion’ which offers a different appreciation of Beauvoir’s ethics. This study has two agendas: to interrogate popular notions of religion by reading it, out of Derrida and Certeau, as a signifier for a situated historical scene; and to show the existential philosophy of Beauvoir as a performance of that scene. In particular, it shows how the structure of relationships she presents in her ethics clearly reproduces the rhythms of the scene of religion. One of the implications of this reproduction is that existential philosophy can only emerge in the context of religion, and is necessarily an iteration of religion. The other implication is that we might reassess how we code the category ‘religion’ in our public and private discourse, with all the disruption that such a different coding might entail.

The first issue of the academic series “Emigrantica” is dedicated to the memory of Oleg A. Korostelev and — as an in memoriam publication — is largely focused on the research interests of the late scholar. A special section of the issue is devoted to the analysis of the research heritage of Oleg A. Korostelev. At the same time, the series sets a new format for research into the problems of Russian emigration literature, and also outlines ways of discussing general problems of emigration studies. The issue opens with an article by the editor-in-chief of the series, offering a detailed overview of the study of emigration in Russia over the past decades and outlining the prospects for the development of emigration studies as a separate field of knowledge. The section “General Issues” deals with theoretical and textual problems: a critical analysis of attempts to apply E. Said’s “orientalism” to Russian emigration, the question of the essential difference between pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary emigration on the example of N.S. Rusanov. The section “Personae” is devoted to Georgii Adamovich, Ivan Bunin and Aleksei Remizov. The section “Creative Heritage: Poetics, Textual Criticism, Editional Practice” covers the older and younger generation of the first emigration, with two contributions on the second and third emigrations. The section “Emigration and the Metropolis” conceptualises the confrontation and mutual influence of Soviet culture and the culture of the Russian Abroad. The section “Varia” contains works that reveal the influence of Russian culture on European cultures (mainly Italian culture), as well as individual stories about the “Russian voice” in the West. The contributors to the issue include specialists representing the biggest Russian centres of Russian emigration studies, as well as the biggest centres of foreign Slavic studies from eight countries. The publication is addressed to literary critics, historians, and cultural historians studying Russian emigration, as well as to all those interested in the literature and culture of the Russian Abroad.

Shortly after Abdulhamid II had become padishah, a book that would prove to be highly influential would be published by the Milanese Treves publishing house: "Costantinopoli" by Edmondo De Amicis. This travel account that shows the influence of earlier French writing (Lamartine, Flaubert, Nerval and others) may be considered the Italian key text on the formative years of Abdulhamid during the reign of Abdulaziz. Not only Italian travelers would be strongly influenced by his impressions and descriptions, but also many European tourists would look at the Ottoman court and capital through his eyes. It can be supposed that the sovereign himself showed a great interest in foreign travel accounts. He certainly did as far as the Italian presence in his state is concerned. He well knew that the Italian presence in Constantinople (Pera, Galata) preceded the city’s Ottoman conquest, this making it the oldest ethnic group – if it is allowed to speak of Venetians, Genoese and many others as a nation, while in reality they had quite recently joined in a process of nation building – after the original Greek population. Not only that: the Italian states had been business partners from the Late Middle Ages (as well as military antagonists). The sympathetic Italian outlook on Constantinople will have contributed in a notable way to the Sultan’s benevolence vis-à-vis Italian culture. Orientalist tendencies in Italian art such as represented by some of Verdi’s operas or Donizetti Pasha’s musical creations, excellent painters such as Zonaro, architects as D’Aronco, tailors as Parma were much welcomed and supported by the Sultan whose keen interest in European culture and technical know-how would be unjustly overshadowed by his political conservatism and his struggle for autonomy as a world leader. Thanks to his efforts contemporary Ottoman culture will find its place among the nations. In this article we will examine some prominent Italian artists and their creations for the Ottoman court.