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California Italian Studies
ISSN 2155-7926 · eScholarship Publishing, University of California · 418 articles in the index
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Journal Article
Introduction: Black Italia and the Insurgent Politics of Knowledge Production
The field of Black Italian studies encompasses a wide array of subfields, methodological approaches, and intellectuals. In this introduction, we advance a provisional definition, conceived not as a definitive or rigidly prescriptive formulation but rather as an opening intervention intended to…
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Journal Article
“Le facce nere del festival”: Black Musicians at Sanremo in the 1960s
This article explores the history of Black musicians at the Sanremo Music Festival during the 1960s, as the festival sought to reach international markets and bolster Italy’s recording and publishing industries. Over that decade, artists including Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick, Wilson Pickett…
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Journal Article
Petro-Modernity and the Racialized Politics of Extraction: ENI and the making of the African Anthropocene
Analyzing two ENI documentaries from the 1960s, Oduroh (1964) and Uomini del petrolio (1965, Oilmen), this article considers the historical and contemporary logics shaping Italy’s extractive relationship with Africa. Framed by the recent revival of Enrico Mattei’s legacy in Giorgia Meloni’s…
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The Racial "Other" in Italian Folklore: Analyzing "The Three Oranges" and Its Adaptations
This paper examines the racialized construction of the false bride figure in “The Three Oranges” folktale tradition, tracing its iterations from Giambattista Basile’s “I tre cedri” (1634, “The Three Citrons”) through Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations. Focusing on tale type…
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Journal Article
On Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism: The Black “Boogeymen” of Childish Gambino and Ghali
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…
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The “Oppositional Gaze” and the Italian Cinema: Joy Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera (1968)
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…
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Journal Article
Translating Black Feminist Thought: Marie Moïse, Rahma Nur, and the Politics of Visibility in Italy
This essay examines how translation shapes Black Italian cultural politics, focusing on the circulation of Black feminist thought in translation as both linguistic transfer and political praxis. Central to the analysis is translator and activist Marie Moïse, whose translations and workshops…
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Journal Article
Fictive Archive, Temporal Reparations, and Italy’s “Postcolonial Now”
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…
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Field Notes from the Multispecies Futures Lab: Entangled Lives, Bodies, and Ecocultural Systems
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…
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Journal Article
The Abunä’s Prayer for Fascist Italy: A Curious Episode from the Colonial Archive (Occupied Ethiopia, 11 June 1940)
This article presents a hitherto unexamined Italian Occupation-era sermon that highlights the relationship between the Italian colonial government in East Africa and a collaborationist faction of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. The text is a public prayer likely given by the Ethiopian Metropolitan…
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Journal Article
Last Gasp Attempts: Don't Believe the Hype, Don't Drink the Kool-Aid
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…
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Journal Article
The Archive of Carmelo Bene
Following legal disputes upon the death of Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), his archive was dispersed, and no inventory of the materials has ever been published. My article is a first attempt to organize the documents that were part of Bene’s original archive, reconstructing over fifty manuscript…
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Journal Article
"La lente bifocale": lineamenti metodologici di una possibile storia del "campo" poetico italiano degli anni Settanta del Novecento
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…
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Journal Article
“Traverser les signes”: Michel de Certeau in Italy
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…
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Journal Article
Contro gli oggetti: attorno a un igloo di Mario Merz nel 1968
Realizzato all’indomani della contestazione francese del maggio 1968, l’Igloo di Mario Merz, intitolato Objet cache-toi, era una peculiare combinazione tra il linguaggio della protesta—il titolo derivava da un graffito apparso in quel periodo sui muri della Sorbona—e la dematerializzazione…
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Journal Article
Basile de Luna e le origini della Carboneria nel Regno di Napoli
This article aims to reconstruct the origins of the Carboneria order in the Kingdom of Naples, identifying them in the context of Europe-wide republican conspiracy. In this way the substantial political-ideological continuity after 1815 between Freemasonry and the Carboneria emerges into view. To…
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Journal Article
Gianteresio Vattimo, 1936–2023: In Memoriam
Over the course of fifty years, Gianni Vattimo was a friend, teacher, and adversary for me. I must resist the temptation to speak here of my own memories of him in order to provide readers of this brief essay with what I think is destined to endure after Vattimo’s death, the essence of which can be…