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. The Roundtable was organized in response to the surge in xenophobic violence sparked by the Italian Parliamentary elections of March 2018 and to mark the publication of Gaia Giuliani's monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2018).

Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy

Mancosu, G
2019-01-01

Abstract

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. The Roundtable was organized in response to the surge in xenophobic violence sparked by the Italian Parliamentary elections of March 2018 and to mark the publication of Gaia Giuliani's monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2018).
2019
colonial archives
coloniality
Fascism
migration
national identity
scientific racism
visuality
whiteness
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11584/346293
 Attenzione

Attenzione! I dati visualizzati non sono stati sottoposti a validazione da parte dell'ateneo

Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 2
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 4
social impact