Papers by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach, in order to contribute to aspects of Compar... more This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach, in order to contribute to aspects of Comparative Literature, Ecocriticism, Cultural Studies and Food Studies, as well as to make two important contributions to Italian Studies. First, to Italian literature of the Resistance which, although well established within Italian studies, has received surprisingly little attention with regard to the influence of peasant support in the success of the Resistance during World War II. Second, my ecocritical approach represents a relatively new specialization within Italian Studies, an approach that considers the ways in which human actions are strictly related to, and dependent upon, the natural environments in which they take place.This dissertation offers also a reinterpretation of the concept of the organic intellectual as proposed by Gramsci, so as to better understand the relationship between peasants and the progressive Italian intellectual class that emerged after WWII. I conclude that...
Environmental Philosophy, 2022
Many contemporary scientific, literary, and speculative writings warn of an imminent mass extinct... more Many contemporary scientific, literary, and speculative writings warn of an imminent mass extinction event brought on by anthropogenic climate disturbances and changes in land use related to the planetary urbanization of capital. Despite the proliferation of such discourses, the forces of social and ecological extinguishment have not decelerated. Contesting Extinctions investigates the harmful tendency of dominant extinction discourses to obscure and erase complex social, biological, and cultural relations. The chapters in this transdisciplinary volume examine both the material constitution and discursive framing of the current social and ecological moment. Narratives of extinction are not neutral accounts, but rather expressions of agendas, ideologies and imaginaries that exert uneven effects on different human and nonhuman communities and their habitats. This volume is both a contribution to extinction studies and an invitation to join in confronting extinction discourses that perpetuate the impoverishment of life. To contest extinctions is to attend to the material and symbolic severing and reorganization of ecosocial relations and to understand how this reorganization produces social inequality and biological annihilation. As a decolonial practice, to contest extinctions is to reckon with colonialism’s ongoing production of inequality and extinction and to call for the nurturance of regenerative, heterogeneous relations.
Italy and the Environmental Humanities, 2018
The Italianist, 2021
Anna Kauber’s documentary film In questo mondo adds an essential
piece to the larger mosaic of th... more Anna Kauber’s documentary film In questo mondo adds an essential
piece to the larger mosaic of the history, tradition, geography, and
culture of the Italian rural world and transhumance. The film
provides visible, palpable, and undeniable evidence of the deep
relation of interdependence, connection, harmony, and intimate
collaboration among humans, animals, and the natural landscape.
Collaboration, in the conversation with the film director, appears
as a respectful and reciprocal way of relating to each other while
giving one to another. This relationship was supported by the
desire to use the film to explore new angles on what
shepherding is today and how a feminine perspective is adding
new values to this ancient tradition. What emerges is an idea and
practice of circular collaboration in which animals have a close
bond with humans, and humans with the animals and the
surrounding ecological landscape.
In a recent conference on the central role of food Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food and Terra ... more In a recent conference on the central role of food Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food and Terra Madre movements, stated that, " Food comes from Nature via the Earth and through it becomes culture ". Food, as the matter that connects humans to the soil, lands, regions, landscapes, water, climates, natural surroundings, cultures and histories, has been transformed by multinational corporations into an artificial, prepackaged , lifeless substance ready to be consumed or discarded, like any other commodity in the global market. How is Italian territory and culture related to the emergence and spreading of such movements throughout the world? This essay comprises two parts. The first part introduces the two international movements within the Italian historical and cultural context and their connection to global realities. This history also bridges the ideas of earth democracy as portrayed by Vandana Shiva, as well as the concept and practice of glocalism and food communities around the world, and the Manifesto on Food and Seeds. The second part focuses on a conversation with their founder Carlo Petrini on the role of ecology, rural traditions and new food cultures within contemporary reality of food crisis, land grabbing, environmental crisis and climate change.
At the end of the XIX century, during the time of the unification of Italy, peasants represent 60... more At the end of the XIX century, during the time of the unification of Italy, peasants represent 60% of the Italian population. After less than a century, during WWII and the time of Resistance, peasants represent 52%, still constituting the majority of the Italian population. During this time, although the Italian territory is populated mainly by peasants, their influence and presence in the main social and political decisions is very minimal if not non existent. In general, the partisan movement during the Nazi occupation in WWII represents one of the most significant examples of Italian civil resistance, but what is remarkable is that the presence and support of peasants resulted in successes crucial to the movement. At the end of WWII, in a moment when Italy reconsidered its position in the reconstruction of the country, peasants' presence is finally mentioned and acknowledged by historians, politicians and intellectuals as a fundamental presence in the success of the resistance movement. Within this context, the story of the Cervi family, a peasant family from Emilia Romagna in the area of Gattatico, between the cities of Reggio Emila and Parma, is particularly significant. The whole family is actively involved in the antifascist movement, and, in 1943, they are among the first farmers of the area to join the partisans. After the war, the communist party in Italy has still a strong presence and works toward maintaining and strengthening their influence in all social strata. As the journalist, ex partisan and member of the Communist party Sandro Curzi stresses in his interview left to Eva Lucenti in 2004, the communist party rediscovers and uses Gramsci's writings and thoughts with the purpose of reaching the people and the subaltern classes. The antifascist engagement of the Cervi family becomes, in the political agenda of the communist party, an important model to use to spread communist values among the common people. It cannot be ignored then that the publication in 1955 of the biography, I miei sette figli by Alcide Cervi and edited by Renato Nicolai, journalist and member of the communist party, is supported by a propaganda and ideological campaign. Nevertheless, my intent is to shift the focus on the family from being considered a symbol of Resistance in ideological and political terms, and to revisit their story as farmers and their relation to their land, as conveyed in the texts, as a form and act of Resistance in itself. My essay focuses on the articles Italo Calvino published in 1943 on the family and the memoire I miei sette figli published two years later. Can we think of Alcide Cervi, in I miei sette figli, as an example of how a peasant man, Alcide, uses indirectly – through Nicolai as is his mediator-language as a vehicle of Resistance by shifting the focus from ideological and theoretical purposes, to pragmatic examples and experiences of a lived life, the life of a peasant family? The innovative and vanguard visions of farming introduced by the Cervi family helped to transform the surrounding landscape, influenced and inaugurated a new understanding of the dynamics between land, humans and non-humans. As both Calvino and later the biography testify, the Cervi family are the first to flatten the land to improve its fertility and maximize the production. The peasant family backgrounds and labor, as well as the agricultural history of the area, are an important testimony of how the land was lived upon and experienced. Furthermore, their story contributed to create a new legacy within the way of thinking
Conference Presentations by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
This is just the abstract
The resistance period and the literary production emerged from it soon after WWII has been studie... more The resistance period and the literary production emerged from it soon after WWII has been studied, appreciated primarily for its historical value, and it has mainly seen as a spontaneous civil movement in which the partisans have been the protagonists. In the same line, most of the novels on and of the Resistance are read mainly as stories of partisans. Although this cannot be denied, it is important to stress the environments where these stories take place such as the mountains, the fields, and the landscapes. Furthermore it has often been overlooked that, alongside with the partisans, many farmers and peasants played a central role in the success of the Resistance movement.
In my presentation I look at the story of the Cervi’s family, a peasant family, before, during and after the Resistance period. I consider the Cervi’s family as an example of a story from below, using a Gramscian term, that lived, acknowledged and experienced the land and the landscape as a mean to improve their life as well as a commons, a land that would be able to sustain and improve the living conditions of the whole surrounding community. I miei sette figli, written by the survived father Alcide Cervi, was first published in 1955. I treat the text not only as a fundamental document of peasant’s activism and resistance, but also an exclusive document on peasants’ life specifically contextualized in the territory between Parma and Reggio Emilia, in the region of Emilia Romagna, where the landscape and the land are protagonists in the story of the family.
This presentation focuses on how activism by environmental thinkers, film documentaries and liter... more This presentation focuses on how activism by environmental thinkers, film documentaries and literary works function as crucial forces in the consciousness-raising of environmental, political and economic issues related on farming and sustainability. Looking at the strategies proposed by some of environmental movements and intellectuals, this paper seeks to offer an opportunity to investigate and rethink how different economic and social alternatives, such as the concept of the commons, the slow-food movement and the concept of de-growth proposed by the French economist Serge Latouche, can be re-articulated within the contemporary political and social context of the neoliberal societies. This presentation seeks to investigate how these movements are offering a possible way out to what today is often referred as a global food crisis, while impacting positively the dignity and economy of local farmers and communities.
A particular bioregional awareness emerged during the Second World War in Italy. The fundamental ... more A particular bioregional awareness emerged during the Second World War in Italy. The fundamental role peasants had in supporting the partisans’ movement produced a fusion between local knowledge and political struggles. My paper proposes an eco-critical reading of some of the novels traditionally belonging to the resistance literature like Vigano’s L’Agnese va a morire, set in the Comacchio Valley, in Romagna; Fenoglio’s I ventitrè giorni della città di Alba, set in Alba and the Langhe, Piedmont; Pavese’s La casa in collina, in the hills around Turin and Calvino’s I sentieri dei nidi di ragno, in the Liguria region, as a way to illustrate the link between those two realities.
Through these novels I intend to expose, under a new light, the regional habits and customs of the peasants, their social interactions among themselves and with the external world. Furthermore, an eco-critical approach to these readings will help us to understand and possibly re-evaluate the fundamental role of the peasant world, difficult to penetrate and traditionally perceived as a world apart, as an essential historical representative of the recent attention given to bioregionalisms.
As Italy celebrates the 150th anniversary of its unification, it’s noteworthy to observe how the ... more As Italy celebrates the 150th anniversary of its unification, it’s noteworthy to observe how the internal historical and political events of the last decades have undermined the identity of a country that always had to face inner divisions and contradictions.
The Financial Times has recently portrayed Italy as two countries: one of political and economic degradation and the other of cultural, artistic heritage, and multiple regional values. Although it is a fairly realistic representation, this analysis doesn’t mention one of the most important factors that Italy has been facing in the last twenty-five years: immigration.
Italy, historically known and viewed as a country of people who emigrate to foreign countries as well as within different Italian regions, found itself in the position of dealing with the arrival of numerous masses of people coming mainly from East Europe and North Africa. This wave of immigration destabilized the self-perception of traditional Italian, forcing them to examine and face new multicultural and multiracial realities.
Italian filmmakers such as Michele Placido with Pummarò (1990), Gianni Amelio with Lamerica (1994), Giorgio Diritti with Il Vento fa il suo giro (2005), Agostino Ferrente with the documentary L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (2006), Vittorio Moroni and his Le Ferie di Licu (2006) and Andrea Segre with his documentary Come un uomo sulla Terra (2008), just to cite a few, took interest in the delicate problems that immigration and the issue of integration bring up, from language to assimilation of cultures. These films show the different social, cultural and political aspects of the new Italian reality and once again problematize the complex relation between “us” and “them”.
Through a gaze at the contemporary Italian cinematic panorama, this presentation touches such themes as cultural identity, multiculturalism, issues related to ethnicity and the tendency to create political and social stereotypes towards the unknown, which makes us feel uncomfortable. While, on the other hand, through a glimpse of life of the “new” Italian citizen, the filmmakers above mentioned demonstrate the willingness of the immigrant to integrate into their acquired motherland. Through the creation of new identities, immigrants are able to change their role and position within social and political spheres.
In the sixties, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini were among the first filmmakers to look at Africa and Asia through film projects and documentaries that are still today considered models of style, poetics and content. In the period after the Second World War, Italian intellectuals looked for the first time at the world with new eyes and hopes. Their perspective can serve us as a reference to acknowledge the change of focus toward the problematic vision of the foreigner. The “other”, once found in foreign countries, is today an integral part of Italy.
Today, Italy finds itself facing all the consequences, inner conflicts and benefits of the irreversible process that a multicultural and multiracial society produces.
Book Reviews by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
Books by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
Lexington Books, 2023
The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance foc... more The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance focuses on the work of a variety of intellectual activists, related food justice literature, and documentary films, and argues that contemporary forms of environmental activism, as they are rooted in local food and sustainable farming, are built on Italian peasant culture and its contributions to the Resistance movement during World War II.
This book looks to the hinterlands to demonstrate that peasants, by sharing their knowledge of the land and traditional practices, produce their own organic intellectuals. Some examples examined are Alcide Cervi, Nuto Revelli, and Ermanno Olmi. Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan argues that their work, personal experiences, and visions of resistance foreground the cultural roots of the Slow Food international grassroots movement. She posits that today, Slow Food and the food communities of Terra Madre in Italy and around the world represent one of the many examples of these new organic intellectuals committed to rebuild a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the land.
Lexington Books, 2021
Contesting Extinctions critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they... more Contesting Extinctions critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about bio-cultural loss. A contribution to extinction studies, this volume confronts extinction discourses that perpetuate the impoverishment of life and calls for the nurturance of regenerative, heterogenous relations.
Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursiv... more Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration.
Contesting Extinctions Decolonial and Regenerative Futures
Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursiv... more Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration.
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Papers by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
piece to the larger mosaic of the history, tradition, geography, and
culture of the Italian rural world and transhumance. The film
provides visible, palpable, and undeniable evidence of the deep
relation of interdependence, connection, harmony, and intimate
collaboration among humans, animals, and the natural landscape.
Collaboration, in the conversation with the film director, appears
as a respectful and reciprocal way of relating to each other while
giving one to another. This relationship was supported by the
desire to use the film to explore new angles on what
shepherding is today and how a feminine perspective is adding
new values to this ancient tradition. What emerges is an idea and
practice of circular collaboration in which animals have a close
bond with humans, and humans with the animals and the
surrounding ecological landscape.
Conference Presentations by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
In my presentation I look at the story of the Cervi’s family, a peasant family, before, during and after the Resistance period. I consider the Cervi’s family as an example of a story from below, using a Gramscian term, that lived, acknowledged and experienced the land and the landscape as a mean to improve their life as well as a commons, a land that would be able to sustain and improve the living conditions of the whole surrounding community. I miei sette figli, written by the survived father Alcide Cervi, was first published in 1955. I treat the text not only as a fundamental document of peasant’s activism and resistance, but also an exclusive document on peasants’ life specifically contextualized in the territory between Parma and Reggio Emilia, in the region of Emilia Romagna, where the landscape and the land are protagonists in the story of the family.
Through these novels I intend to expose, under a new light, the regional habits and customs of the peasants, their social interactions among themselves and with the external world. Furthermore, an eco-critical approach to these readings will help us to understand and possibly re-evaluate the fundamental role of the peasant world, difficult to penetrate and traditionally perceived as a world apart, as an essential historical representative of the recent attention given to bioregionalisms.
The Financial Times has recently portrayed Italy as two countries: one of political and economic degradation and the other of cultural, artistic heritage, and multiple regional values. Although it is a fairly realistic representation, this analysis doesn’t mention one of the most important factors that Italy has been facing in the last twenty-five years: immigration.
Italy, historically known and viewed as a country of people who emigrate to foreign countries as well as within different Italian regions, found itself in the position of dealing with the arrival of numerous masses of people coming mainly from East Europe and North Africa. This wave of immigration destabilized the self-perception of traditional Italian, forcing them to examine and face new multicultural and multiracial realities.
Italian filmmakers such as Michele Placido with Pummarò (1990), Gianni Amelio with Lamerica (1994), Giorgio Diritti with Il Vento fa il suo giro (2005), Agostino Ferrente with the documentary L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (2006), Vittorio Moroni and his Le Ferie di Licu (2006) and Andrea Segre with his documentary Come un uomo sulla Terra (2008), just to cite a few, took interest in the delicate problems that immigration and the issue of integration bring up, from language to assimilation of cultures. These films show the different social, cultural and political aspects of the new Italian reality and once again problematize the complex relation between “us” and “them”.
Through a gaze at the contemporary Italian cinematic panorama, this presentation touches such themes as cultural identity, multiculturalism, issues related to ethnicity and the tendency to create political and social stereotypes towards the unknown, which makes us feel uncomfortable. While, on the other hand, through a glimpse of life of the “new” Italian citizen, the filmmakers above mentioned demonstrate the willingness of the immigrant to integrate into their acquired motherland. Through the creation of new identities, immigrants are able to change their role and position within social and political spheres.
In the sixties, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini were among the first filmmakers to look at Africa and Asia through film projects and documentaries that are still today considered models of style, poetics and content. In the period after the Second World War, Italian intellectuals looked for the first time at the world with new eyes and hopes. Their perspective can serve us as a reference to acknowledge the change of focus toward the problematic vision of the foreigner. The “other”, once found in foreign countries, is today an integral part of Italy.
Today, Italy finds itself facing all the consequences, inner conflicts and benefits of the irreversible process that a multicultural and multiracial society produces.
Book Reviews by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
Books by Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan
This book looks to the hinterlands to demonstrate that peasants, by sharing their knowledge of the land and traditional practices, produce their own organic intellectuals. Some examples examined are Alcide Cervi, Nuto Revelli, and Ermanno Olmi. Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan argues that their work, personal experiences, and visions of resistance foreground the cultural roots of the Slow Food international grassroots movement. She posits that today, Slow Food and the food communities of Terra Madre in Italy and around the world represent one of the many examples of these new organic intellectuals committed to rebuild a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the land.
piece to the larger mosaic of the history, tradition, geography, and
culture of the Italian rural world and transhumance. The film
provides visible, palpable, and undeniable evidence of the deep
relation of interdependence, connection, harmony, and intimate
collaboration among humans, animals, and the natural landscape.
Collaboration, in the conversation with the film director, appears
as a respectful and reciprocal way of relating to each other while
giving one to another. This relationship was supported by the
desire to use the film to explore new angles on what
shepherding is today and how a feminine perspective is adding
new values to this ancient tradition. What emerges is an idea and
practice of circular collaboration in which animals have a close
bond with humans, and humans with the animals and the
surrounding ecological landscape.
In my presentation I look at the story of the Cervi’s family, a peasant family, before, during and after the Resistance period. I consider the Cervi’s family as an example of a story from below, using a Gramscian term, that lived, acknowledged and experienced the land and the landscape as a mean to improve their life as well as a commons, a land that would be able to sustain and improve the living conditions of the whole surrounding community. I miei sette figli, written by the survived father Alcide Cervi, was first published in 1955. I treat the text not only as a fundamental document of peasant’s activism and resistance, but also an exclusive document on peasants’ life specifically contextualized in the territory between Parma and Reggio Emilia, in the region of Emilia Romagna, where the landscape and the land are protagonists in the story of the family.
Through these novels I intend to expose, under a new light, the regional habits and customs of the peasants, their social interactions among themselves and with the external world. Furthermore, an eco-critical approach to these readings will help us to understand and possibly re-evaluate the fundamental role of the peasant world, difficult to penetrate and traditionally perceived as a world apart, as an essential historical representative of the recent attention given to bioregionalisms.
The Financial Times has recently portrayed Italy as two countries: one of political and economic degradation and the other of cultural, artistic heritage, and multiple regional values. Although it is a fairly realistic representation, this analysis doesn’t mention one of the most important factors that Italy has been facing in the last twenty-five years: immigration.
Italy, historically known and viewed as a country of people who emigrate to foreign countries as well as within different Italian regions, found itself in the position of dealing with the arrival of numerous masses of people coming mainly from East Europe and North Africa. This wave of immigration destabilized the self-perception of traditional Italian, forcing them to examine and face new multicultural and multiracial realities.
Italian filmmakers such as Michele Placido with Pummarò (1990), Gianni Amelio with Lamerica (1994), Giorgio Diritti with Il Vento fa il suo giro (2005), Agostino Ferrente with the documentary L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (2006), Vittorio Moroni and his Le Ferie di Licu (2006) and Andrea Segre with his documentary Come un uomo sulla Terra (2008), just to cite a few, took interest in the delicate problems that immigration and the issue of integration bring up, from language to assimilation of cultures. These films show the different social, cultural and political aspects of the new Italian reality and once again problematize the complex relation between “us” and “them”.
Through a gaze at the contemporary Italian cinematic panorama, this presentation touches such themes as cultural identity, multiculturalism, issues related to ethnicity and the tendency to create political and social stereotypes towards the unknown, which makes us feel uncomfortable. While, on the other hand, through a glimpse of life of the “new” Italian citizen, the filmmakers above mentioned demonstrate the willingness of the immigrant to integrate into their acquired motherland. Through the creation of new identities, immigrants are able to change their role and position within social and political spheres.
In the sixties, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini were among the first filmmakers to look at Africa and Asia through film projects and documentaries that are still today considered models of style, poetics and content. In the period after the Second World War, Italian intellectuals looked for the first time at the world with new eyes and hopes. Their perspective can serve us as a reference to acknowledge the change of focus toward the problematic vision of the foreigner. The “other”, once found in foreign countries, is today an integral part of Italy.
Today, Italy finds itself facing all the consequences, inner conflicts and benefits of the irreversible process that a multicultural and multiracial society produces.
This book looks to the hinterlands to demonstrate that peasants, by sharing their knowledge of the land and traditional practices, produce their own organic intellectuals. Some examples examined are Alcide Cervi, Nuto Revelli, and Ermanno Olmi. Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan argues that their work, personal experiences, and visions of resistance foreground the cultural roots of the Slow Food international grassroots movement. She posits that today, Slow Food and the food communities of Terra Madre in Italy and around the world represent one of the many examples of these new organic intellectuals committed to rebuild a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the land.