This article explores the relationship between Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)—French historian, theologian, and anthropologist—and the contemporary Italian academic milieu, with a particular focus on his engagement with semiotics and mysticism. On the one hand, Certeau took an active role in the scholarly and research initiatives promoted by the International Center for Semiotics and Linguistics in Urbino, where he revisited, developed, and articulated the central themes of his work. On the other, he found especially fertile ground for dialogue with Italian scholars on the subject of mysticism. Concentrating primarily on the network of relationships that emerged during the 1970s, the article also reconstructs the main trajectories through which Certeau’s thought was received and interpreted in Italy during his lifetime and afterward.

In this article, I explore the work of Joy Nwosu, an ethnomusicologist, musician and film scholar, who in 1968 published Cinema e Africa nera: L’immagine dei neri nel cinema bianco e il primo cinema africano visti nel 1968 (Cinema and Black Africa: The Image of Black People in White Cinema and Early African Cinema as seen in 1968). I approach Nwosu’s study, now over fifty-five years removed from its original date of publication, in order to examine the work as an example of what scholar and activist bell hooks articulates as an “oppositional gaze,” or a critical viewing practice enacted by Black women spectators. Specifically, what would it mean to acknowledge Nwosu’s study as a foundational moment of postcolonial Italian Cinema Studies thus challenging the historiography of the field? I will first outline the sociopolitical contexts of Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera, including African decolonization and its reception in Italy. I then consider the study’s significance in relation to a body of scholarship on Italian cinema and media studies attendant to racial discourse and representation, most notably those produced within the last twenty years. I argue that Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera directs us to reconsider Italian film history proper, advancing a critical race and decolonial analysis prior to the formative emergence of these fields almost two decades later.

This open-theme issue celebrates the centenary of two important figures in European and Italian culture in the second half of the twentieth century.Both Mario Merz and Michel de Certeau were born in 1925; in their youth both were involved in Resistance activities during World War Two; but from that point on,

What are the risks of falling prey to protagonisms within the realm of cultural organization and curation? How might we reflect upon the work that we engage in as not aligned with the modes and motivations of cultural institutions around us? What does it mean for the objectives of shifting culture and society to be unaligned with those divisive factors that keep us focused on obtaining those few resources available in exchange for notions of integration into a system that has done little to demonstrate a care for what we represent? I have often reflected upon the notion of collectivity within curatorial practice and the ways in which the shifting away from the individual, the opacity provided by collective gestures, force institutions to have to dismantle those assignments of value that leave space for only those “chosen” to enter.

By sketching out the theoretical contours of what Hal Foster terms a contemporary “archival impulse,” this essay highlights the analytical potential with regards to the coupling of archive and postcolonial literature in Italy. This focus leads to the examination of how the archive’s literary mediation with pastness enables new temporal trajectories, for which the recuperative impulse can also disturb normative historicist practices. In this essay, I will focus on the novel Timira : Romanzo Meticcio (2012) by Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed and examine how its innovations in both narrative content and form generate essential potentialities for reframing the power relations between archive, fiction, and the political dimension of historicity. The approach adopted by both authors brings real-life details closer to literary invention and immerses fictions within concrete and factual objects, thus creating a new literary form that allows the emergence of new epistemological arrangements alternative to current trends in postcolonial criticism. In this novel, imaginaries of incompletion, fragmentation, and rhizome allude to the disruption of a past-present temporal continuum and transform the post- as a contested site pointing to a new process of becoming . Speaking directly about the function of the archive allows us to consider how the hermeneutic malleability between narrative and history intervenes critically in Italy’s current narratological ambition to imagine a postcolonial “now.” Additionally, I suggest that Timira ’s aesthetic potential pertains to an emerging cultural shift in Italy where the traditional (violent) mode of looking-backward and moving-forward has been giving way to accommodating alternative critiques of time, inviting us to reflect on the generative power of future-thinking.

This article examines the socially conscious creations of Black “boogeymen” by two artists of widespread appeal and noteworthy success: African American actor, writer, producer, and rapper Donald Glover, and second-generation Italian rapper of Tunisian parents, Ghali. Contributing to ongoing conversations sparked by Afropessimists and Afrofuturists, I aim to show that Glover’s and Ghali’s respective artistic interventions recenter the historically dismissed Black presence in history and culture in the U.S. and Italy from the perspective of Black men. First, an analysis of song lyrics and audiovisual elements in both artists’ versions of “Boogieman” elucidates a shared Afropessimistic impulse imploring the listener to acknowledge and confront the structures of racism that have shaped negative perceptions of Black communities, particularly Black men. Next, through observations of the Afrofuturistic elements experimented with by Glover and Ghali, I illustrate the performers’ active and imaginative (re)creations of the “boogeyman” legend, through a Black cultural lens. I close this article by sharing additional examples of Ghali’s recent and ongoing contributions to the Afrofuturism movement in Italy and beyond, underscoring his role in expanding its reach and resonance across diasporic contexts.

The quantitative and qualitative broadening of the Italian poetic field in the 1970s, which occurred in response to the profound coeval socio-cultural changes (mass schooling, proletarianization of culture, emergence of new political-poetic and social subjects), requires literary critics interested in reconstructing the poetic framework of the decade to substantially update their tools of inquiry. The idealistic, inductive and often "monofocal" approach most frequented by Italian academic criticism, accustomed to treating the text as an autonomous organism and ignoring its correlations with its historical and material context of reference, has so far revealed its inadequacy in accounting for the plurality of poetic and cultural experiences of those "hyper-historical" years, ending up by entrenching itself in an asphyxiated geo-editorial canon and in anachronistic trend categories that are hardly representative of the actual context of the decade under consideration. This paper aims to draw the methodological lineaments of a "bifocal" approach to the 1970s, namely one that reconciles context reconstruction and text analysis, sociological inquiry and stylistic-philological criticism, close and distant reading, based in particular on the operational model offered by Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology (with forays into the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Pascale Casanova, Alain Viala and Franco Moretti). After briefly sketching the structural changes occurred in the post-sixty-eight historical-poetic landscape and reconstructing the terms, places and editorial modes of the critical debate around the poetry of the 1970s (paragraphs 1 and 2), this article proceeds to a theoretical reconnaissance around Bourdieusian notions of "field," "conflict" and "habitus" and then proposes an empirical application of them to the specific Italian poetic field of the decade (paragraphs 3 and 4).

These field notes—in contrast to a typical journal article—employ a creative structure and approach to explore the goals and activities of a new humanities lab. The notes begin by remembering the tragic death of a young migrant agricultural worker in the Agro Pontino region of Italy, Mr. Satnam Singh. This untimely loss of life is then contextualized within the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” migration from India to the Global North and read through the notion of “the Cybercene”—a transformational ecocultural sub-era of the Anthropocene. Via the theoretical lens of the relatively new field of multispecies humanities, the Agro Pontino is shown to be an ecocultural space replete with colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era co-becomings. The second section briefly describes two more projects to illustrate the lab’s four basic theoretical premises: namely, i) the analysis of natureculture, ii) the use of situated decolonial epistemologies, iii) the search for a material turn, and iv) delimiting anthropocentricity. These foundational premises, newly developed methods such as “multispecies thick-mapping,” “naturalcultural discourse analysis” and the use of the Cybercene as an ecocultural rather than a techno-scientific organizational principle are offered as exciting avenues for future analyses of profoundly entangled naturalcultural identities and multispecies affects, interests and destinies.