CFP Transnational Italies: Mobility, Subjectivities and Modern Italian Cultures Conference, British School at Rome, 26-28 October 2016
30 Oct 2015, by in News
Keynote speakers: Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Marina Warner
The conference is part of the AHRC funded project Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures and opens the project exhibition at the British School at Rome.
The history of Italians and of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and transnationalism. Such experiences reflect the history of Italy as an ‘emigrant nation’ (Choate), an imperialist power, and a European country facing the challenges of world system transformation from its Mediterranean location. These histories of mass movements also represent millions of individual and collective trajectories, traced through micro-processes of cultural translation, acts of transmission, and memory mediation of subjects from a variety of national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The conference aims to shed new light on the history of Italian cultural mobility. It will explore how the notion of ‘Italianness’ has been dynamically reformulated and performed by individual and collective subjects drawing from ideas of the nation state and its regimes of citizenship, from transcultural practices and transnational imaginaries. The conference aims to broaden the frame in which we read Italian history, memory and culture, considering the multiple levels of their negotiation, mediation and remediation. It aims to stress the fluid and relational nature of (Italian) culture and belonging, by investigating events, media and memories through which they have been materialised, imagined and performed.
By encouraging contributions that investigate the many kinds of representation – visual, written, oral and digital – that have been produced by subjects whose everyday practice has been defined by linguistic and cultural translation, the conference aims to explore the experience of transcultural belonging. Concentrating on a specific narrative, theme, or representative strategy of ‘Italianness’, papers will investigate the way in which human beings make sense of their experiences, and how notions of memory and cultural belonging are shaped by the movement across linguistic, social and cultural boundaries.
Pre-formed panels are welcome and papers can be submitted both in Italian and in English.
250-300 word abstracts with a bibliography of 3-4 titles should be submitted by 30th January 2016 to:
Abstracts should follow this order:
author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) bibliography
Please specify in the subject of your email: ‘Transnational Italies Abstract Submission’.
We will acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in two weeks, you should assume we did not receive your proposal.
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