Seminar - Postcolonial Italy

Il seminario da noi organizzato a questa conferenza intendeva esplorare la condizione postcoloniale dell'Italia contemporanea, la sua societa' multiculturale e la sua produzione culturale transnazionale. In the last twenty years, the arrival of African, Asian, Latin American and Eastern European immigrants has turned Italy from a country of emigration into a nation that now hosts one of the most diverse immigrant populations in Europe. This new reality deserves attention and analysis. Although this remarkable social change has given impetus to a consistent body of emergent theoretical, scholarly, and cultural production, up until today there has been little analysis that systematically combines the literature on immigration and multiculturalism, the colonial experience, and the development of Italy’s cultural, political, and social history in light of that experience. In the Italian context, the term “postcolonial” is rarely employed to explore the historical continuum and cultural genealogy that link the colonial past to contemporary history and society. Even less often is a theoretical understanding of postcolonial studies encouraged which analyzes the specificity of the Italian context away from the more traditional Anglophone paradigm. The organizers welcome papers across a wide range of subject disciplines, which focus on Italian postcolonial contemporaneity, and more specifically on one or more of the following categories: • Colonial historiography • Multiculturalism, ethnicity, race • Meticciato, hybridity, historical and contemporary racism • Exoticism, orientalism, and the colonies in the collective imaginary • Rereading of Italian literary and cultural canon • Colonial and postcolonial citizenship • Contemporary cinema and colonial films • Remapping spaces, rethinking periphery/metropole • Memory and quotidian hi/stories • Anti-colonialism and resistance strategies in contemporary Italy • Subaltern Others of Italy