Contemporary Italy Research Articles

Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media: Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies – fourth international conference, The American University of Rome, 13–15 June 2024

The fourth international conference of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies (JICMS) was held at The American University of Rome on 13–15 June 2024. The co-organizers were Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College) and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome) and this year’s title was Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media. Participants from five continents and various countries, with diverse academic backgrounds, including film studies, Italian studies, media studies, social sciences and industry practice, came together for three days of stimulating discussions and productive exchanges of ideas and perspectives. The keynote address ‘Non-fiction filmmaking in contemporary Italy’ was delivered by Áine O’Healy from Loyola Marymount University. The conference was further enriched by the presence of directors Paolo Benvenuti, Monica Guerritore and Liliana Cavani. This report provides an overview of the conference.

Non-binary narratives: subjectivation and lived experiences in contemporary Italy

This paper explores the processes of individual and collective subjectivation experienced by non-binary individuals living in contemporary Italy. Using qualitative methods, the study, which was conducted between July and September 2021, involved a sample of twenty-six young adults aged between eighteen and thirty years. Starting from participants’ narratives, the thematic analysis revealed the significance of both physical and virtual support environments in the subjectivation process, taking into account the diverse micro-contexts in which people live. The study’s findings underscore the continued need to challenge societal norms and structures that perpetuate discrimination against people who reject exclusive identification with the male or female gender and opt for more fluid and non-traditional definitions of gender identity.

Contrasting Realities: Italian Advertisements and Non-Sexist Linguistic and Social Norms

This research aims to scrutinise whether sexism is confined solely to the Italian advertising domain or extends into the language employed by the general populace and the broader cultural fabric of society. In Italy, despite numerous efforts made over the past decades to eradicate sexism in advertising campaigns, marketers frequently resort to its various manifestations, deeming it a powerful tool for attracting potential consumers. The prevalent utilisation of the female image in a sexist manner, portraying women as objects of desire, remains commonplace. Surprisingly, even renowned influencers aligned with the radical feminist movement often incorporate such tactics in their social media content. Sexism manifests through two principal avenues: firstly, the erotic portrayal of women’s bodies and/or their sensual behaviours, frequently coupled with language expressions encompassing with dual meanings; secondly, the perpetuation and reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles. While the latter has largely diminished in the contemporary era, the former persists prominently. This case study research employs a qualitative analysis approach. Various data sources, including legal documents, historical records, and contemporary media, are critically analysed. The findings suggest that, despite the societal and linguistic rejection of sexism in contemporary Italy, where gender equality prevails across social, economic, and legal realms, the advertising industry continues to rely on such practices heavily.

Anti-Politics in Contemporary Italy by Vittorio Mete, London-New York: Routledge, 2023. 250p., £29.24 (eBook)/£130.00 (hardback)

Anti-Politics in Contemporary Italy by Vittorio Mete, London-New York: Routledge, 2023. 250p., £29.24 (eBook)/£130.00 (hardback)

Body in the forefront, again? Distance learning drawbacks and implications for policy

The COVID-19 pandemic launched a challenge on the education system and required schools to make organizational changes in order to continue serving the local community. Essential to this process are support teachers who play a key role as agents of change. Despite their role, the perspectives, desires, and needs of these teachers have since been neglected, despite their centrality in contemporary Italy. Accordingly, the specific aim of this study revolves around supporting teachers’ experiences with digital technologies (i.e., learning applications, telecommunication media, and interactive devices) within a pandemic context, especially technologies used to maintain the educational bond with students with disabilities. Attuned to an interpretative paradigm, this qualitative research has an ethnographic design, which was implemented in a secondary school in a Northern Italian city. Throughout the article, we discuss the three main drawbacks found in fieldwork: (i) the prevailing change in bureaucratic management; (ii) the pervading mind–body binarism in teaching; and (iii) a long-term vision for inclusion being subject to a passive logic of adaptation. Finally, we reflect on some emerging implications. The first points to a necessary move from a rationalistic school management to an alternative model focused more on guaranteeing social justice among educational stakeholders. The second is that the very introduction of a new technology should be aimed at engaging actors whose work has been invisible to date in a school setting to empower them as key agents for change. The third suggests that, to overcome community disaggregation and mind-body binarism, a teacher-researcher figure is needed, a figure with holistic skills in addition to those of a technical nature delivered by institutional training programs.

Mikołaj Kopernik jako podmiot badań nad pamięcią. Znajomość postaci i dorobku naukowego w wybranych krajach europejskich

The article focuses on an analysis of the level of knowledge of contemporary British, Germans, French, Italians and Poles about Nicolaus Copernicus the person and his scientific achievements. The analysis is based on the results of an international quantitative survey concerning this historical figure that was carried out in 2022 in the countries mentioned. Despite happily associating Nicolaus Copernicus with the cultural heritage of their own countries, it turned out that the respondents knew little of the astronomer’s achievements. A comparison of the recognisability of this figure in the three countries with which he was most associated, that is, with Poland, Germany and Italy, also shows that Italians more often than Germans associate the cultural heritage of their country with this figure. This may prove that it is not in Germany but in contemporary Italy that stronger or more effective processes of discursive and symbolic elaboration of the past take place in the context of the legacy of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Political and gender narratives: An immersion in contemporary Italy through the social lens on women leaders

This article presents a comparative analysis between two prominent figures in contemporary Italian politics, Giorgia Meloni and Elly Schlein, with a particular focus on the gender dynamics that permeate their political context and influence their public trajectory. Through an in-depth exploration of their political narratives, the analysis centers on the use of gender as a central element in both leaders' strategies. The initial phase of the analysis involved a quantitative assessment conducted through social data analysis to understand the extent of online presence and influence of the two political figures under examination. Only subsequently are the discourses and public communications related to women, family, and gender issues highlighted and analyzed. This research aims to provide a unique perspective on how political and gender positions influence politics and contribute to an understanding of contemporary political dynamics in Italy

‘Being old’ and ‘feeling old’ in contemporary Italy: Active ageing and COVID-19

Over the last 20 years, ageing has been studied through the lens of an active ageing perspective, which considers older adults as responsible for their own conditions. However, the COVID-19 health emergency has highlighted its limits. Drawing on a sample of semi-structured interviews – collected before and during the pandemic – with people aged 65 years and above who are self-sufficient and live in Turin, Italy, this article explores the representations and perceptions of ageing, to highlight the possible effects of the COVID-19 emergency. The results show that representations of ageing revolve around two fundamental viewpoints: one considers older adults as a cost for the community because of their unproductiveness; the other overlaps the loss of self-sufficiency with a definition of ‘real’ old age. Furthermore, the interviews introduce a distinction between those who – considered productive despite their age – were called to provide a service to the community during the lockdown, and those who were judged vulnerable because of their age. Such ambiguous messages have raised new questions about an active and successful ageing imperative.

Divorce Rites as a Way of Dealing with a Life Course Transition: The Case of Contemporary Italy

In Western culture, divorce is becoming a transition event in individual life courses. As a result, it starts to be celebrated in ritual forms. In Italy, divorce is still a highly deritualized event from both civil and religious perspectives, although the transformations that make divorce a transition event have been occurring in recent years. This article depicts the complexities of divorce in a society such as Italy, where instances of social change coexist with strong elements of tradition. Emerging cultural practices related to couple dissolution in both formal and informal contexts are discussed. Structural determinants emerge as a force that can contribute to shaping the divorce rite as a new rite of passage.

Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy

Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy

Contesting the Black Flâneur: The rhetoric of disruption and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's urban literature

This article investigates the spatial poetics of disruption in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's second novel Il comandante del fiume. The book sets a unique stage around fragmented flashbacks to resignify the configuration of Afro-Italian urban identity and community. These flashbacks are rendered through a complicated recoding of Rome's urbanscape by its protagonist, Yabar, a young Somali immigrant who experiences a mysterious disfigurement of his body and narrates his past as he recuperates in the hospital. The Black body thus becomes the primary shifting site through which new paradigms of spatial arrangements against power and authority are articulated. This article argues that, by having Yabar fantasize, observe, and live through Rome's urban physicality, Ali Farah delineates a poetics of disruption that functions to redraw the conceptual boundaries of Blackness and postcoloniality in contemporary Italy. Ali Farah's experiment with the city as an actual character de-romanticizes it as a historical fixed site, and instead displays the possibility of plurality in the shape of Black corporeal relationality in determined stances. In this novel, not as observed objects, the protagonists remap Rome as a Black city and carry forward a Benjaminian mode of flâneur to observe the city's fragmented and chaotic arrangements, demystifying its undercurrent construction of racial exclusion.

Contradictory forces, facts and tendencies

ABSTRACT This article draws upon the ‘contradictory forces, facts and tendencies’ central to sociologist, historian, activist and cultural theorist W.E.B. Du Bois’ framing of race, and places them within a metaphysical and sociological analysis of exclusionary frameworks in contemporary Italy. Problematizing the formation of global black perspectives, this text intends to initiate an exchange that may foster the development of strategies, language and tools needed for the making of a new narrative in the Italian context, a narrative that cannot be realized without a profound reflection on the historical trajectory of cultural exchange between the African continent and the territory known as Italy extending back into antiquity. Drawing upon the dialogue initiated in the Young Gifted and Black Italia (Y.G.B.I.) Research Residency, a range of interviews carried out over the past decade and a half, and several research platforms developed by Black History Month Florence (B.H.M.F.), I hope to highlight the potential for collective approaches that have the potential to provide the scaffold for Italian specific meditations with transnational implications. Calling for multiplicities in relation to social and psychological understandings of displacements and states of post-displacement in Italy, this writing seeks a contextually grounded positionality that, however hindered by the chauvinism of nationalistic narrations of history, imply an inclusion that need not be validated. In so doing I intimate an Italian-ness that is as conscious of how it is framed through its own making, as it is aware of the framing devices applied from abroad.

Debunking anti-Chinese stereotypes in Italy: intersectional perspectives and intermedial aesthetics in Sergio Basso’s Giallo a Milano (2009)1

ABSTRACT In this essay I analyse Sergio Basso’s documentary Giallo a Milano (Made in Chinatown, 2009), which took part in a wide-ranging media debate following the April 2007 protest of the Chinese community in Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan. In particular, my focus is on the various intermedial strategies employed within it, which, on the one hand, offer an extremely multifaceted and aesthetically sophisticated counter-narrative of its subject and, on the other, allow to debunk many of the stereotypes circulating about the Chinese in dominant mass media and popular discourse, powerfully bringing to light a series of portraits of migrant and post-migrant subjectivities in contemporary Italy, in which the complex intertwining of their identities of ethnicity and race, gender, social class and sexual orientation are constructed and performed on the cinema screen.

Posthumous Selves

Abstract The self-elegy is considered a hyper-literary genre which provides the readers with a self-portrait of the poets, while also discussing their own poetics and literary works. This article aims to re-map the genre of self-elegiac writing in contemporary Italy by focusing on two recently published collections: Patrizia Cavalli’s Vita meravigliosa (2020) and Biancamaria Frabotta’s Nessuno veda nessuno (2022). Both collections play with the genre of self-elegiac writing by trying to redefine its boundaries: first, both authors problematize the gender perspective intrinsic to the elegy; second, Cavalli and Frabotta delve into some of the canonical references and the structure of the elegiac genre; third, they insert their elegiac discourse within a global literary community.

Indelible: Violence Against Women and Their Resistance to It in the Visual and Performing Arts in Italy and Beyond.

The visual and performing arts can be instrumental in exposing the complexity of the numerous forms violence against women and girls takes, and in exploring old and new forms of resistance. The articles in this special issue emerged from a three-year project of the Visual and Performance Studies Research Group funded by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to examine the representation of violence against women and their resistance to such violence in Italy and beyond and contribute to analysis and understanding of how gendered violence and resistance to it are represented in the arts. A key strand concerned the arts in contemporary Italy, but its scope was broad and encouraged comparison with other societies in order to share significant aspects of the Italian situation with a wider audience, highlight the global scale of the problem, and help identify opportunities for collective resistance. This scope is reflected in the four pieces here, which examine the possibilities that different forms of representation can offer either to reinforce or contest violence against women.

Is Fascism really back in Italy?

Italy was the homeland of Fascism (proper noun). From 1922 until 1943, a self-described Fascist regime ruled the country. As a result of the national election on 25 September 2022, a political party with its roots in that Fascism became the dominant partner in a far-right coalition national government. Does this signify the full-fledged return of the past for Italy's future or does it represent something else again? As Umberto Eco once claimed, Fascism was an unstable cocktail of beliefs and practices associated increasingly with the whims of one man: Benito Mussolini. From this perspective, unlike Nazism, which can be plausibly defined neatly in terms of its central obsessions with biological races and anti-semitism, Fascism has lent itself to multiple interpretations. Hence, fascism (common noun) has become a term used in a myriad of ways to describe a range of political ideologies, albeit all anchored to the singular significance of national identities at the expense of much else. I challenge Eco's claim that Fascism had no elemental ideological core and then trace the history of Fascism in Italy and how its memory lived on after the demise of the regime most intimately connected to it. I then turn to recent Italian politics and what the changed historical-geographical context of the times suggests about which elements, if any, of the original Fascism can be expected to re-emerge under the new regime. I end with the conclusion that whatever “fascism” does presently emerge in Italy will be unlike the original version. In fact, most of the core of what branded the original Fascism looks mostly irreproducible in contemporary Italy.

Collective memory and trans history in the Italian context: Archival practices and the creation of the first trans archive in Italy

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the relationship between history, memory, archiving and trans experiences. This body of work has shown how questioning the praxis of archiving from the vantage point of trans experiences has the potential to problematise cis-heteronormative assumptions around the body, time and space and to queer the epistemological premises around what constitutes archives and archival practices. In this article, we present the experience of the project ArchiviST* – Archivi Storia Trans (Trans History Archives) which aims to create the first archive exclusively dedicated to the history of trans lives and activism in contemporary Italy. The project has been promoted by Trans Identity Movement, the most influential and long-lived trans association in Italy. Since its birth in 1979, Trans Identity Movement informally collected a substantial documentary heritage concerning trans and LGBTQIA+ history as a political practice to preserve the counter-memories of its people and movements. The ArchiviST* project carries out the inventorying and digitising of the materials, together with the collection of original video-recorded interviews with pioneering activists of the trans movement. By presenting a reflection on the process of ‘reconstructing’ an archive in this context, we unpack and explore some of the key issues surrounding trans archiving and collective memories in the Italian context: what counts as collective memory? What types of relationships are established between trans memories and the documents present in the archive? What memories have (not) been told, and what voices and subjects have (not) emerged as protagonists? We encourage a reflexive attitude towards the practice of trans archiving to problematise established historiographical categories, such as time, private/public, political engagement, life history and memory and to recognise the ethical and methodological challenges that such a path poses to historiography and archive research in general.

Internet as a Meeting Place for Spouses: Homogamy, Assortative Mating and Online Dating in Contemporary Italy

This article studies the places where spouses met for the first time in Italy. The focus is on online settings in the most recent marriage cohorts (2000-2009 and 2010-2016). The aim is to investigate trends over time in the use of the Internet as a meeting place and to explore whether Internet dating can affect the rules of assortative mating and homogamy. Information about first marriages is analyzed to focus on highly engaged relationships. A quantitative approach is used and bivariate and multivariate analyses are conducted. The data used for the analyses come from the national representative survey "Family, social subjects and life cycle" carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) in 2016 and made available in 2020. The results allow a preliminary quantification of the phenomenon and document an increase in online dating in Italy (from 0.4 percent of spouses who first met online in the marriage cohort 2000-2009 to 2.5 percent in the cohort 2010-2016). The data support the idea that online contexts show homogamy paths not different from those that characterize offline dating venues. Meeting an online partner doesn’t seem to imply heterogamy.

The Racialized Welfare Discourse on Refugees and Asylum Seekers: The Example of “Scroungers” in Italy

The rise of anti-immigrant racism over the past two decades has taken place through multiple mechanisms and processes, including the resurgence of welfare racism, which has been re-functionalized towards refugees and asylum seekers. As a key weapon of today’s sovereignism and white supremacism, the “return” of welfare racism is intrinsic to the rise of neo-liberal racism and is an integral part of a global process of erosion of social rights, weakening of social citizenship, and dismantling of the welfare state. Welfare racism—a combination of racial discrimination in the welfare system and racialized welfare discourse—operates through discriminatory laws and measures related to social benefits and through public discourses depicting refugees, immigrants, and people of color as parasites and scroungers sponging off the welfare state. The resurgence of welfare racism in the last decade has seen the specific spread of welfare racism against refugees and asylum seekers as part of the dual war on asylum and on the welfare state. This article examines the ideological-discursive dimension of welfare racism (that is, the public discourses, rhetoric, and images), first analyzing the development, dimensions, and characteristics of racialized welfare discourse more generally, then focusing on racialized welfare discourses about refugees and asylum seekers in contemporary Italy. It explores the arguments and conceptual metaphors of the racialized welfare discourse on asylum seekers, revealing the devices and dynamics at play in the construction of the refugee as a “scrounger” and welfare abuser. Furthermore, it highlights the consequences of racialized welfare discourse on public policies (particularly on social policies and welfare controls), on migration policies (particularly on immigration controls and internal controls), and on the relationship between citizens and migrants, receiving societies, and newcomers.

Displacing displacement: narratives for a haunting history

ABSTRACT In this article, building on recent theories of displacement, I propose a definition of post-displacement as a ‘displacement of displacement’, or the displacement of already displaced histories. The analysis focuses on the ethnographic case of Latina, an Italian city built in 1932 by the Fascist regime. Given its controversial past that cannot be celebrated, Latina is presented here as a displaced city, whose history cannot serve as a locus for place-making, meaning-making, and future-making. I analyse how the selective re-elaboration of the city’s history by Latina’s inhabitants and local public officials displaces an already displaced history. Through a momentary silencing of Fascism and renewed connections to national history, these narratives allow for the past to be spoken about and remembered, while also fostering a sense of the self in place. Nonetheless, Fascism cannot be completely erased and remains a haunting absent presence. This article thus offers a reflection on (post-)displacement and on the presence and absence of Fascism in contemporary Italy.