Eye-Centricity and the Visual Cultures of Italy and Its Diaspora

Eye-Centricity and the Visual Cultures of Italy and Its Diaspora, 2019

Annual Conference: "Eye-Centricity and the Visual Cultures of Italy and Its Diaspora" April 26-27, 2019 Italy, and by extension italianità, is a hyper-visualized locus that is well suited for critical interventions on visual culture. This interdisciplinary conference proposes to explore the visual cultures Italians have created, consumed, and been the subject of from early modernity to the contemporary “post-text” era. Italians—including inhabitants of the nation-state, members of the diaspora, and former colonial subjects—have been conceptualized, rendered, and understood to a large degree by the visual. Landscapes (e.g., Roman ruins, the “old neighborhood”), individuals (e.g., the picturesque contadina, the criminalized immigrant), objects (e.g., fascist architecture in Asmara, pizza), and cultural concepts (e.g., bella figura, the evil eye) have been the stuff of visual arts, media, advertisement, tourism, and vernacular renderings concerning Italy’s histories and identities within and beyond the country’s geopolitical boundaries. These and other visual frames are didactic modes by which tropes of Italy and Italians are promoted and consumed, contested and re-imagined. This conference builds on the work of visual culture studies scholars with their concern for scopic regimes, commodities, and the visual manifestations of race, gender, and sexuality. This event is free, open to the public, and held at the Calandra Institute. John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Queens College, CUNY 25 West 43rd Street, 17th Floor, New York NY 10036 212-642-2094 | [email protected] | calandrainstitute.org

Journal of Visual Culture, 2019

This Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy brings together scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss historical constructions of Italian whiteness and national identity in relation to the current xenophobic discourse on race and migration, stressing their rootedness in as yet unchallenged modern notions of scientific racism. Building on postcolonial historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s definition of the colonial archive as a ‘site of knowledge production’ and a ‘repository of codified beliefs’ in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009: 97), the discussants conceive the archive as a multi-layered, collective repository of aspiration, dominance, desire, self-aggrandizement and fear through which the development of society’s self-image can be revealed but also – through a systematic and critical approach to the (visual) archive of coloniality – contested. Based on the analysis of visual cultures (photographs, news footage, advertisements, propaganda, fiction film, etc.) the Roundtable addresses and connects wide-ranging issues such as: the gaze from above and below in colonial-era ethnographic film; the depiction of migration in the Far Right’s rhetoric; representations of fears and fetishisms towards Others in Federico Fellini’s work; and the exploitation of the colonial past in the Italy–Libya Bilateral Agreements on migration.

2001

This essay is a brief exploration of the related concepts of Italian Ethnicity and Italian Ethnic Identity via a Visual Sociological study of two geographically different venues — Italian American neighbourhoods in the United States and neighbourhoods in Rome, Italy. By studying the Vernacular Landscape (Jackson, 1984) via the methods of Visual Sociology (Grady, 1996 and Harper, 1988, Rieger, 1996), and the theoretical perspectives of Urbanization of Capital (Harvey, 1989) and Spatial Semeiotics (Gottdiener, 1994) the question: “What does it mean for mean for a place of a space to ‘Look Italian’?” is addressed. For data, the discourse draws from my extensive collection of visual studies in both the United States and Italy of the “Public Realms”, or spaces accessible to all (Lofland, 1998 ). Here are featured my observations and photographic research on the “New Immigrants to Rome”.

2020

Visions of Italy Popular conceptions of Italy typically revolve around the visual: the beauty of its landscapes and its historic legacy of fine art and architecture. This dates back at least to the medieval period, and the innovations of artists such as Giotto and visionary writers like Dante. In the twentieth century, it is in the fields of cinema, photography, art, fashion and design that Italy has had the most marked impact around the world. Concurrently, Italy has also been a favoured subject of visual representation: from Grand Tour photographic albums to mainstream Hollywood films set in Italy, there is no lack of foreign representations of the country and its inhabitants. This conference will explore Italian visual culture, Italy’s relationship with the visual and the way in which Italy and Italians have been depicted. It aims to further a dialogue among scholars in the field of Italian studies who deal with visual culture in the broadest sense, from studies of visual arts and objects to literary works characterized by an emphasis on the visual. Papers and panels will address topics such as: Cinema and photography; Visual arts of all eras, from Medieval and Rennaissance to contemporary art; Fashion and design; Advertising and visual culture; Intermediality and cross-media representation; Visual representations of Italians and Italian culture abroad (e.g. Italian-Americans, the diaspora, etc); Visual representations of migration to and within Italy; Transcultural representations of Italy and Italians; Ekphrasis and visual culture in Italian literature; Visualisation within, and of, the work of medieval and early modern authors (e.g. Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca). Keynote speaker: Prof Stephen Gundle.

JOMEC Journal, 2015

In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, Rachel Donadio looks at the movie as a commentary on the impasse that seems to paralyze Italy. Through this viewfinder, the journalist writes, Sorrentino sets the stage to have his say on 'a culture that is blocked, resigned, embalmed in elegant decline', where 'inertia overwhelms all forward momentum'. As with other movies produced in the last two decades, most notably Nanni Moretti's Il Caimano, The Great Beauty is part lament, part critique of all that is wrong with a country that the fiction identifies with its political leadership. Italian directors criticize the country's pervasive atmosphere of inertia and decadence. Sorrentino has often remarked that although his films are not political per se, their representation is a critique of Italy's current state of affairs. Contemporary history, that is, lies at the core of his artistic engagement. Yet, the baroque aestheticism of The Great Beauty reworks current tensions in an ambiguous fashion. This chapter employs journalistic sources and textual analysis of the film to inquire into what kind of cultural memory of contemporary Italy emerges from the scene. It uses Sorrentino's neo-baroque aesthetic register and filmic philosophy of civic engagement as frameworks to explore history in the making. To this end, the essay refers to Patricia Pisters' recent work in The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012). Contributor Note Enrica Picarelli is a visual and media studies scholar, a freelance translator, and digital ethnographer at a fintech company in Cambridge. She has taken part in a number of policy-impacting projects, including as 'Michael Ballhaus Fellow' at the Center for Digital Cultures of Luephana University from 2011 to 2013. At present, Picarelli is External Postdoctoral Associate at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) at Lisbon University where her research focuses on African and Afro-diasporic sartorial subcultures on participatory media. Her publications have appeared in Clothing Cultures, Transformations, Altre Modernità, as well as chapters in several British and American anthologies.

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MLN, 2005

Visual and Material Legacies of Fascist Colonialism, special issue of Modern Italy, 2022

In this special issue of Modern Italy, four early-career scholars examine how the study of objects and images rooted in Fascist imperialist history enables a sustained interrogation of Italy's colonial imaginary. Their articles explore the diverse possibilities offered by the study of visual and material culture for scholars of imperialism, as it is precisely this realm of visual and material culture that emerges as a site of negotiation in which different individuals and constituencies contended with the regime's ideology. Visual and Material Legacies of Fascist Colonialism is by no means the first scholarly project to interrogate the relationship between the aesthetic field and the Fascist colonial project. Pioneering studies in different disciplinary fields, as well as contemporary art projects, have addressed the role of architecture, cinema, art and exhibitions in underpinning colonial ideology under the Fascist regime. We have added an extensive (but by no means exhaustive) thematic bibliography on these studies at the end of our introduction. While building upon the aforementioned scholarship, the aim of this special issue (perhaps one of the most heavily illustrated ever published by Modern Italy) is to highlight how the complementary methodologies of visual and material studies, in tandem, can be used to unpack the colonial imaginary of Fascist Italy. In the next few pages, we probe this approach and apply it to two case studies. We hope that this special issue will act as an invitation to scholars to adopt such productive partnership of visual and material studies for the study of other subjects pertaining to Italian colonialism. Fascist colonialism and its legacies Italy was already a colonial power when Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922. In 1882 Assab Bay on the Red Sea became Italy's first overseas territory. Eritrea was militarily occupied three years later and Somalia in the 1890sthe former became Italy's first official colony in 1890. In 1901, in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, Italy also gained a share of the European concession in Tianjin, China. But until the ascent of Fascism, Italy's most important colony was Libya, which it invaded in 1911. The following year, Italy also occupied the Dodecanese Islands.

Two exhibitions in Florence focusing on Italian identity through visual art, culture and craftsmanship. 1927, The return to Italy. Salvatore Ferragamo and the Twentieth-century visual culture marks the ninetieth anniversary of his return to Italy after twelve years in California, and focuses on the rebirth of Italian culture after the Great War. Dawn of a Nation at Palazzo Strozzi explores art, politics and society from the 1950s till 1968. From different points of view, both exhibitions highlight how Italian identity was rebuilt after the trauma of the two wars in distinctive but equally meaningful ways.

This introduction on Iconic Images in Modern Italy seeks to explore the recent developments in the conversation on iconic images in the fields of art history, cultural studies, film studies and history of photography within Italian Cultural Studies concerning the ways in which we can perceive and interpret such images. The special journal issue brings together nine articles based on presentations given at the ASMI annual conference in November 2013 held at Senate House, London. The articles constitute a survey of iconic images and symbols that work as strongly identifiable images both nationally and internationally in conveying ideas of ‘Italianicity’.