Intersectional Italy

This book questions Italian “white innocence” and examines the specificity of Italian racial discourse through the analysis of different kinds of texts and representations. Intersectionality – a theoretical and methodological approach focusing on the multidimensional discrimination that individuals and groups experience based on their race, color, gender, and other axes of oppression – has only recently been embraced as an effective methodology in Italy, whose national identity is structured around the “chromatic norm” of whiteness. The categories of race and color have been almost absent in post-war public debate as well as in scholarly discourse. Feminist movements and theoreticians have mostly placed gender at the core of their analyses, leaving white privilege unchallenged and undertheorized. Colonial and postcolonial studies have linked present-day racism to Italian colonialism, thus shedding light on contemporary incarnations of Empire. In this volume, the authors adopt an intersectional methodology to question Italian “white innocence” and to examine the specificity of Italian racial discourse through the analysis of different kinds of texts and representations. The volume also includes two interviews with writers and intellectuals Djarah Kan and Leaticia Ouedraogo, who discuss how they articulate concepts of intersectionality, Blackness, white privilege, and structural racism in Italian contemporary culture and society. The book will be of great significance to students, researchers and scholars of Migration and Postcolonial Studies interested in gender, class, and racial identity. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

This book argues for the importance of adopting a postcolonial perspective in analysing contemporary Italian culture and literature. Originally published in Italian in 2018 as Riscrivere la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, this new English translation brings to light the connections between the present, the colonial past and the great historical waves of international and intranational migration. By doing so, the book shows how a sense of Italian national identity emerged, at least in part, as the result of different migrations and why there is such a strong resistance in Italy to extending the privilege of italianità, or Italianness, to those who have arrived on Italian soil in recent years. Exploring over 100 texts written by migrant and second-generation writers, the book takes an intersectional approach to understanding gender and race in Italian identity. It connects these literary and cultural contexts to the Italian colonial past, while also looking outwards to a more diffuse postcolonial condition in Europe.

This book explores intersectional constructions of race and whiteness in modern and contemporary Italy. It contributes to transnational and interdisciplinary reflections on these issues through an analysis of political debates and social practices, focusing in particular on visual materials from the unification of Italy (1861) to the present day. Giuliani draws attention to rearticulations of the transnationally constructed Italian ‘colonial archive’ in Italian racialised identity-politics and cultural racisms across processes of nation building, emigration, colonial expansion, and the construction of the first post-fascist Italian society. The author considers the ‘figures of race’ peopling the Italian colonial archive as composing past and present ideas and representations of (white) Italianness and racialised/gendered Otherness. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Italian studies, political philosophy, sociology, history, visual and cultural studies, race and whiteness studies and gender studies, will find this book of interest.

Images of southern Italy as a place of arrival for migrants with different origins and backgrounds have in recent years proliferated in Italian media as well as in contemporary Italian literature and cinema. The unprecedented perspective which presents the mezzogiorno as a place where people arrive, and not only as a place of departure, constitutes a major change in the collective imaginary on the region and fosters new engagements with its migratory histories. This book presents one of the first studies to focus entirely, through in-depth readings of a range of contemporary literary and cinematic texts, on the representation of contemporary migration to southern Italy, and on the concomitant changes in the tradition of representation of the region. Informed by translation theory, and by decolonial, queer and feminist critique, this innovative study zeroes in on the mutual construction of race, gender and sexuality, and on the translation and hybridization of languages and cultures at the southern border. By giving a rich and compelling account of texts which tell multiple stories of mobility from, to and through the South, this book traces the emergence of a transnational imaginary of the mezzogiorno which offers useful tools for an urgent reconfiguration of collective and individual identities.

Originally conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 as a tool for the analysis of the ways in which different forms of social inequality, oppression and discrimination interact and overlap in multidimensional ways, the concept of 'intersectionality' has attracted much attention in international feminist debates over the last decade. Framing Intersectionality brings together proponents and critics of the concept, to discuss the 'state of the art' with those that have been influential in the debates that surround it. Engaging with the historical roots of intersectionality in the US-based 'race-class-gender' debate, this book also considers the European adoption of this concept in different national contexts, to explore issues such as migration, identity, media coverage of sexual violence against men and transnational livelihoods of high and low skilled migrants. Thematically arranged around the themes of the transatlantic migration of intersectionality, the development of intersectionality as a theory, men's studies and masculinities, and the body and embodiment, this book draws on empirical case studies as well as theoretical deliberations to investigate the capacity and the sustainability of the concept and shed light on the current state of intersectionality research. Presenting the latest work from a team of leading feminist scholars from the US and Europe, Framing Intersectionality will be of interest to all those with interests in gender, women's studies, masculinity, inequalities and feminist thought.

This work explores Dickens’s perception of Italy as it appears in the travel book Pictures from Italy. Corpus methodologies, alongside the notion of intersectionality, display the writer’s multi-faceted interpretation of the Italians and his efforts to highlight their multidimensionality and heterogeneity. The book debates that Pictures from Italy departs from conventions – it investigates the function of travel in the construction of Italian identity and discusses Dickens’s relationship with Italy. Corpus linguistics methodologies analyse the language of the book and shed newlight on the relationship between body language and culture.

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up-to-date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels. The contributors critically examine part-time employment in different institutional settings across Europe, the USA, Australia and Korea. This analysis serves as a prism to investigate wider trends, particularly in female employment, including the continued increase in part-time work and processes that are increasingly creating dualisation and inequality between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs.