Skip to main content

Visuality, Race and Nation in Italy: Roundtable and Book Launch

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

Free event, book via Eventbrite

Speakers and discussants include: Charles Burdett (University of Bristol), Gaia Giuliani (CES University of Coimbra), Marianna Griffini (King's College), Linde Luijnenburg (Warwick University), Gianmarco Mancosu (Warwick University), Alessandra Ferrini (University of the Arts London).

With a focus on visual culture, the roundtable will bring together scholars from different disciplines within the humanities and the arts. Through the collective discussion of a series of case studies spanning from cinema, news media, popular culture and archival imagery, it will consider the ways the colonial project has shaped Italian national identity - and how, as a deeply ingrained system of thought, it influences the contemporary political debate.

The roundtable will be followed by the launch of Gaia Giuliani's latest book, Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave 2018), which will feature a conversation with the author. This volume contributes to the important transnational debate on constructions of race and gender, femininity and masculinity, class and cultural and territorial differences in modern and contemporary Italy, focusing on the history of racial constructions in Italy from 1861 and analysing a wide range of visual sources.

Charles Burdett is Professor of Italian at Bristol University. The principal areas of his research are literary culture under Fascism; travel writing; the Italian colonial presence in Libya and East Africa and its legacy; theories of inter-cultural and transnational contact; the representation of Islam and the Islamic world in recent Italian literature and culture. His books include Journeys through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing between the Wars (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007) and Italy, Islam and the Islamic World: Representations and Reflections from 9/11 to the Arab Uprisings (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015). He is one of the investigators of the AHRC large grant, 'Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures' (2014-2017).

Gaia Giuliani is researcher at the Centro de Estudos Socias - University of Coimbra, associate professor in Political philosophy (ASN 2017, Italy), principal investigator of the FCT project '(De)Othering. Deconstructing Risk and Otherness in Portuguese and European mediascapes', and founding member of InteRGRace, the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Race and Racisms (Italy). Her research interests focus on visual constructions of race and whiteness from an intersectional viewpoint. Her methodology crosses political philosophy, critical race and whiteness studies, postcolonial, cultural and gender studies. Among her publications: the co-authored monographic book Bianco e nero. Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani with dr. Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Le Monnier/Mondadori education 2013) [First prize 2014 in the 20th-21st century category by the American Association for Italian Studies], the edited Il colore della nazione (2015), and the monographic book Zombi, alieni e mutanti. le paure dall'11 settembre ai giorni nostri (2016) and her first English monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, May 2018).

Marianna Griffini is a PhD candidate in the European and International Studies Department at King's College London. She received PhD scholarships from the Economic and Social Research Council and from the Fondazione Einaudi (Turin). Her research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonialism, immigration, fascism, and the Far Right. Indeed, her PhD project investigates the relationship between Italian colonialism and the Italian Far Right's anti-immigration discourse. Marianna is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the History department at King's College London, teaching courses on contemporary European History and on the role of memory in contemporary politics and society.

Linde Luijnenburg is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research project focused on the representation of racial difference in the commedia all'italiana. She has published peer-reviewed articles on Italian postcolonial film and literature, on Somali-Dutch literature, and is part of the board of editoria of the Italian studies journal Incontri. She is also a filmmaker, and works on a digital platform in which she hopes to intertwine research and the Seventh Art.

Gianmarco Mancosu is PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. His doctoral research explores how Italian newsreels and documentaries about decolonization contributed in re-imagining the national identity after the Second World-War. Following his first PhD dissertation (Cagliari, 2015), he is working on a monograph about the 'Reparto Foto-Cinematografico Africa Orientale dell'Istituto Luce'. He collaborates with the Archivio Storico dell'Istituto Luce (Rome) and with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Addis Ababa. He is currently 'Luisa Selis' Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (School of Advanced Studies - University of London) researching on transinsular memory and belongings in Sardinian communities outside the island.

Alessandra Ferrini is an artist-filmmaker, PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London. Her research is rooted in lens-based media, (post)colonial and memory studies,historiographical and archival practices. Her work has featured in international exhibitions,screenings and conferences, including: the 16th Rome Quadriennale (Rome, 2016-17), the Royal Anthropological Film Festival (Bristol, 2017), Document Film Festival (CCA Glasgow,
2017), A-i- R Wro (Wroclaw European Capital of Culture, Poland, 2016). Alessandra is the recipient of the BFI Experimenta Pitch Award at the 2017 London Film Festival. She is also member of InteRGRace, the Insterdisciplinary Research Group on Race and Racisms (University of Padova).

Contact name:

Contact phone: 2076316612