The first example concerns what the writing collective Wu Ming has defined ‘Progetto transmediale multiautore sulla famiglia Marincola’ [a multi-author transmedial project on the Marincola family] (Wu Ming 2013). The nonfiction transmedial storyworld comprises two micro-narratives that recount the respective biographies of Giorgio and Isabella Marincola. Born in Mogadishu to Aschirò Hassan, a Somali woman, and Giuseppe Marincola, an Italian soldier stationed in the colony of Somalia, the two siblings were taken from their mother at a very young age and relocated to Italy to be raised as Italian within their father’s family.

To borrow from Marie-Laure Ryan’s study on transmedial storytelling, Carlo Costa and Lorenzo Teodonio’s book Razza partigiana: Storia di Giorgio Marincola (1923-1945) (2008) acts as the ‘Mother ship’ of the Marincola’s storyworld (Ryan 2020: 21). It functions as the ‘main gate’ into the storyworld because it provides extensive information about the political and cultural context permeating Italy during the fascist regime (Ibid.). The writer Wu Ming 2 has contributed substantially to the expansion of this storyworld.  For several years, he not only staged and performed the concert-reading Razza partigiana (2009) across Italy, but he also published the book Basta uno sparo: Storia di un partigiano italo somalo nella Resistenza (2010) distributed together with a CD recording of the show. The website www.razzapartigiana.it maps how several artworks, documents, and cultural initiatives strive to recover the neglected history of the Black partisan Giorgio Marincola, constructing a counter-history to the established whitewashed narrations of the Italian Resistance. As attested by Giorgio’s speech, delivered on the fascist Radio Baita following his capture by Nazi troops, his struggles in the Resistance were not limited to liberating the Italian peninsula from Nazi-fascism. His desire was to see any country, including Italy’s colonies, free from fascist oppression. Interestingly, the story line concerning Giorgio converges into another storyworld that Wu Ming 2 has called ‘partigiani migranti’ [migrant partisans] (Wu Ming 2 2019), which collects books and films narrating the stories of combatants from several countries in the anti-fascist Resistance.  This transmedial universe includes Matteo Petracci’s 2019 book, Partigiani D’Oltremare: Dal corno d’Africa alla Resistenza Italiana, which retraces the story of the colonial subjects who, after evacuating the indigenous villages at the Overseas Exhibition in Naples in 1943, joined the Resistance in the Marche region of Italy.

The story of Isabella, Giorgio’s sister, is narrated in the short film Quale razza (2008), directed by Aureliano Amadei which was followed by the novel Timira. Romanzo meticcio (2012), written by her son Antar Mohamed and Wu Ming 2.The artworks describe how, throughout her life, Isabella battled both with exoticising representations of her Black body, especially during her career in artistic and cinematographic circles in Rome, and with the residual colonial imaginaries that have persisted in contemporary Italian society. The multi-author concert-reading Come fratelli e sorelle: Vite profughe, esistenze partigiane (2012), performed by Tamara Bartolini and Michele Baronio, comprises segments of both Giorgio and Isabella’s narratives.

The commemorations of the centenary of Giorgio Marincola’s birth on 23 September 2023 demonstrate that the Marincola storyworld continues to expand to this day. In fact, groups of activists organised several cultural activities in different Italian cities to honour Giorgio’s memory. Furthermore, the number of articles published to commemorate the anniversary demonstrates the successful dissemination of Giorgio’s transmedia narrative.

In conclusion, this blog has examined briefly how the Marincola transmedial project displays transmedial communication, through the dispersion of historical elements embedded within several media objects. This is important as it enables the project to reach the attention of as wide a public as possible, deconstructing before it the concept of whiteness as the defining category of national belonging, while simultaneously uncovering Italy’s colonial past.

Article written by Adil Mauro which was published by the magazine Rolling Stone on 23 September 2023.

Works cited:

Burdett, Charles, ‘The Transnational Study of Italian Culture and the Ghosts of Empire’, Journal of the British Academy, 10 (2022), 1-19.

Ryan, Marie-Laure, ‘Transmedia Storytelling and Its Discourses’ in Transmediations. Communication Across Media Borders, ed. by Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 17-30.

Wu Ming, ‘Speciale #PointLenana e #Timira | Narrazioni ibridate tra Limonov e il Corno d’Africa’, Giap, 20 December 2013 < https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2013/12/speciale-pointlenana-timira/ > [Accessed 24 September 2023].

Wu Ming 2, ‘Partigiani migranti. La Resistenza internazionalista contro il fascismo italiano’, Giap, 15 January 2019 < https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2019/01/partigiani-migranti/ > [Accessed 24 September 2023].

L'articolo Transmedial Storyworlds and the Struggle Against Italian Colonial Amnesia sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Through sessions combining short talks with interactive activities, we aimed to tackle three questions:

• How does co-creating research work in practice?
• How can we as researchers think creatively about opportunities for collaboration in, and emerging from, our own research?
• How can co-creation be leveraged to support us in winning research funding grants?

Clodagh Brook’s talk, which opened the Summer School, discussed different models of co-creation that could be applied to our research, by underlining the non-linearity of the process of co-creation and the advantages of bringing collaborators on board right at the start of a research project.

The subsequent sessions were divided onto three main areas, namely relations with education, industry and the arts. The sessions on education, led by Cecilia Brioni and Giuliana Pieri, discussed experiences of collaboration with undergraduates and secondary-school students, namely Giuliana’s ‘Interart in Schools’ project and Cecilia’s project to bring her research on YouTube into a collaborative university classroom. The session on industry was led by Martina Mendola, a recent graduate of Trinity with a PhD in Italian who now works for Accenture. She discussed her experience as a researcher in the industry and how relevant our work on identity can be in an industry setting. The two sessions led by Derek Duncan and Simone Brioni respectively dealt with co-creation of outputs with artists. Derek shared with us his experience of collaborating with photographer Mario Badagliacca for their book, Italy is Out. Simone talked about his documentary, Oltre I bordi, which uncovered Italy’s fascist-era colonialisation through a box of family photographs.

The second part of each session was designed to encourage participants to experiment with different kinds of creative collaborative activities, including designing a module with co-creative elements, making a pop-up exhibition, brainstorming research questions using post-its, discussing how to collaborate with artists as early career researchers, and creating the storyline for a documentary.

The final activity of the Summer School was a research sandpit, where participants were asked to work in groups to write the rationale for a research grant and identify the intended outputs for a collaborative research project that would fit each participant’s research interests and involve a co-creation element. The three groups produced three projects: ‘Before Ferrante. Women Writers between Visibility and Invisibility’, ‘The Aest(h)etics of memory in Urban Spaces’ and ‘Minority Engagement in the Metaverse: Voice and Visibility’. Results of the sandpit were then presented to a panel of judges, from Trinity’s Research Office and Trinity’s Tangent: Ideas Work Space, who decided the winning project. The prize was supported by the SIS.

Overall, the Summer School was very well received. Participants particularly appreciated its learning-through-doing approach that enabled them to experiment with different techniques of, and approaches to, co-creation. Our speakers actively participated in all activities, providing useful feedback on the ideas that were shared in the small group activities.

The Summer School enabled us all to carve out two days to reimagine our research and teaching in a more collaborative and impactful way.

L'articolo Report of the 3rd Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School: Collaboration and Co-Creation in Italian Studies sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The most engaging discourse on the social function of garments is found in Gadda’s major work, La cognizione del dolore, first published in serialised form between 1938 and 1941. Set in the imaginary South American country of Maradagàl, an allusive criticism of fascist Italy, the novel establishes an opposition between neurotic individuality, embodied by the intellectual protagonist, Gonzalo, as Gadda’s alter ego, and a boastfully grotesque society. This dichotomy, reinforced through Gonzalo’s vestimentary choices, is reminiscent of the struggle in fashion between “individual difference” and “social homogeneity” theorised by sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1905 treatise, Philosophie der Mode (Simmel 2020: 202). Consumed by a mysterious melancholia, the highly civilised Gonzalo is extremely attentive to his immaculate wardrobe, comprised of a formal suit, custom-made shirts, suspenders to avoid irregularities in the fit of his pants, and a pair of pointed-toe, lace-up shoes made of the blackest goat leather. A master of sartorial subtraction, he expresses a firm repudiation of the pullover sweaters, which are certainly a subtle reference to Mussolini’s late-1920s informal style (Billeri 2019: 92).

In a remarkable passage of the novel, Gonzalo also evokes the social scene with which he feels incompatible, a universe populated by ostentatious parvenues who closely resemble the members of the Lombard rising bourgeoisie. Adorned in lavish evening clothes, they conceitedly exhibit a hyperbolic inventory of ornaments, such as “fripperies, toggles of cornelian or polished bone, assorted haberdashery.” Silk merchants and pompous engineers cannot wait “to put on their heavy furs from beyond the polar circle, of the strangest bears, sables, seals from Pitt Land, kangaroos from Australasia, and opossum” (Gadda 2017: 147-148). In his sarcastic depiction of sartorial kitsch, Gadda focuses purposefully on the phenomenon of men’s furs, which had come into vogue in Italy at the beginning of the 20^th century, when fur coats began to be produced for car drivers. Quickly adopted by men of high society to be worn over their dinner jackets (Figure 2), furs were indeed made from the pelts of various exotic animals heavily exploited by Milanese furriers (Municchi 1988: 14-36; Figure 3).

In Gadda’s sociology of fashion, an unusual preoccupation emerges with the modalities and appearance of men’s clothing. In the context of Italian literature, the singularity of Gonzalo’s obsessive minimalism brings Gadda’s reflection on masculine apparel interestingly closer to an influential, although controversial, antecedent, that of Adolf Loos’s essays on the dangers of ornamentation. In writings such as “Men’s Fashion” (1898) and the seminal “Ornament and Crime” (written in 1908 but first published in Italian by the magazine Casabella in January 1934; Figure 4), Loos aims his modernist battle at Art Nouveau decorativism while promoting a unilateral, Eurocentric celebration of sobriety and understatement in fashion, seen as the peak of modern civilisation. Loos equates dressing well with the adoption of a correct dress code exemplified by ascetic British standards in menswear (Loos 1993: 10-12). Gadda’s rejection of exhibitionism and ornamentation, which is paradoxically counterposed by his baroque literary style, should thus be understood within the frame of a wider debate on stylistic purity initiated decades earlier by certain theorists of European modernism.

* This contribution draws upon my doctoral dissertation on “Fashion and Literary Modernism in Italy: Palazzeschi, Marinetti, Gadda,” defended in 2019 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and currently under revision for publication.

Figure 1                                                                                                                                                Figure 2

Figure 1) Gadda (second from left) upon his departure for Argentina on November 30, 1922. Full page from Fabio Pierangeli, Carlo Emilio Gadda. Turin: Gribaudo, 1995.

Figure 2) A men’s evening fur coat with an astrakhan collar. From the 1907 privately printed catalogue of Sartoria “E. Giorgetti,” Milan.

Figure 3                                                                                                               Figure 4

Figure 3) Advertisement for the Milanese furrier “Brivio Giuseppe,” early 1920s. Courtesy Civica Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli, Milan.
Figure 4) Index page of the January 1934 issue of Casabella, with Adolf Loos’s “Ornamento e delitto.” Courtesy Mondadori Media S.p.a.

Bibliography

Billeri, Matteo. 2019. “Gadda, Mussolini e l’orango. Una fonte per Eros e Priapo,” Paragone, vol. LXX, no. 144-145-146, August-December, pp. 83-95.

Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. 2017. The Experience of Pain, translated by Richard Dixon. New York: Penguin.

Loos, Adolf. 1993. Parole nel vuoto, translated by Sonia Gessner. Milan: Adelphi.

Maraini, Dacia. 1973. E tu chi eri? Interviste sull’infanzia. Milan: Bompiani.

Municchi, Anna. 1988. Homo in pelliccia. Modena: Zanfi.

Simmel, Georg. 2020. Stile moderno: saggi di estetica sociale, edited by Barbara Carnevali and Andrea Pinotti. Turin: Einaudi.

L'articolo Ornament as Crime: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Sociology of Fashion sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The plurality of adjectives adopted by Damen described an extremely eclectic and hybrid panorama of international visual poetics in the 1960s and 1970s, in which very distant approach, research and operations can be traced, ranging from the textual and phonetic performances of Gerhard Rühm, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli, to the technological collage-poems of Lucia Marcucci, Lamberto Pignotti and Michele Perfetti, from the transgressive pornographic poetry of Hans Clavin and the logo-iconic combinations of Clemente Padin, Giusi Coppini and Jean-François Bory, to the photographic text-compositions of Ketty La Rocca and Luciano Ori, or to the works of a series of artists who have ‘subjected the book to a tension which dilates its concepts, techniques, and materials’ (Miccini, 1980) with regard to intermediality and intertexuality, such as Giuliano Della Casa’s Motopoem (1971), Gianni Bertini’s Oppure (1970), Dieter Roth’s Quadrat Print (1965).

In 1965 Paul De Vree described this cross-disciplinary dimension as a form of ‘integratie poëzie’ (De Tafelronde, no. X/I), while Dick Higgins (Dé-collage no. 6, 1967) and Adriano Spatola (Geiger no. 5, 1972) defined it as ‘intermedia’ (Figure 2).

The vast and controversial history of post-World War II visual poetics is rich and fragmented and is characterised by transnational exchanges and multiple geographies as well as different lineages and expressions. In fact, while sharing the ground-breaking principle whereby ‘the arts have entered into a fusion’ (De Vree, 1968), the wide and intercultural context of poetic concretism and visuality arises from diverse linguistic contexts, political environments and historical backgrounds such as the 1968 counterculture which marked a turning point in the change of aims and attitudes between Concrete and Visual poetry.

Influenced by Concrete art and structural linguistics, concretist poets worked on the embodied presence of words by creating spatial-typographic compositions to be fitted or stripped, whereas visual poets engaged with intersemiotic relationships and diverse techniques (cut-ups, fold-ins, ready-mades) by introducing political tensions in the poetic body through the collage of words and media fragments (e.g. newspapers articles, advertising images, photo novels, comic strips, printed ephemera).

In Italy, this critical shift in the concept and in the aesthetic of poetry took the name of poesia tecnologica (Gruppo 63, 1963-69) and poesia visiva, which, since their inception in the early 1960s (Gruppo 70, 1963-68) and their distinctive manifestations during the 1970s (Gruppo Internazionale di Poesia Visiva, also known as Gruppo dei Nove, 1972-79), performed strong interactions between photography, painting, typography and graphic design (Figure 3).

Incited and opened up in the multilingual networks of neo-avant-garde experimental poetry, from Europe to Brazil, from North America to Japan, the specificity of Italian and Belgian relational axis is located in the wider context of cross-references and shared experiences that deeply informed the international and intermediate phenomenon of poesia visiva. The long-lasting exchanges between the two countries resulted in the production of seminal collective poetry collections (Il Libro 1968-1971, 1971), ἔξω-editorial projects (De Tafelronde, 1953-81; Lotta Poetica, first series: 1971-75) and mixed-media works (including picture-poems, alphabetical writings, verbovisual objects and typewriter compositions) that have revolutionized accepted notions of linguistic production by creating a critical path that led to the ‘visual turn in poetry’ (Vos, 1987) as well as to the ‘linguistic turn in visual arts’ (Rorthy, 1967). Founded in 1971 by Sarenco and Paul De Vree, the literary magazine Lotta Poetica (poetic struggle) is the aim of Italian and Belgian co-authored artists’ publications, interartistic exchanges and international poesia visiva movement (Figure 4).

The official organon of a militant protest and in radical contrast to the logic of advanced capitalism, Lotta Poetica investigates the impact of new media, political imagery and technologies on poetry by establishing itself at the core of social activism and neo-avant-garde verbicovisual investigations. Combining insights across verbal and figurative arts, media poetics and literary semiotics, this pivotal co-authored artists’ publication triggers a cultural integration of knowledge and creates a unique model of interdisciplinary cooperation where historic avant-garde legacies and futurable dimensions of visual poetics strongly converged.

Envisioned by the German philosopher Siegfried J. Schmidt as one of the major ‘perspectives on the development of post-concrete poetry’ (1982), this significant moment in 20^th century visual poetics has in fact created artistic experiences, languages and styles that we are still experiencing today, and is now forcefully taking centre stage again. Counter Weight (E. Beaulieu, 2018), Finding Chopin (T. Vonna-Michell, 2005-18), Subtraction (Splitting) (T. Auerbach, 2007) and No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96 (K. Goldsmith, 1997) are just a few significant examples of contemporary artists and poets working at the intersection of visual art and literature, producing some of the most compelling work in either medium.

*This topic is at the core of an ongoing postdoctoral research project entitled Concrete & Visual Poetry: Artists’ Publications and/as Connections with Italy and Belgium in the 60s and 70s carried out at the University of Liège and KU Leuven. It will be further explored in the international symposium ‘Engaged Visuality: The Italian and Belgian Poesia Visiva Phenomenon in the 60s and 70s’ which will be organised in collaboration with Jan De Vree (M HKA Museum, Antwerp) and hosted by the Academia Belgica of Rome in December 2021.​

Figure 1) Herman Damen. Mixing the concretes, in Herman Damen Poesia Visiva. Exhibition catalogue no. 5. Brescia: Studio Brescia, 1972. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

Figure 2) Paul De Vree (ed.). De Tafelronde, no. X/I (Integratie Konkrete Poëzie). Antwerp, 1965. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

Figure 3) Lucia Marcucci. Anonima, 1967, collage on cardboard, 51.5 x 36 cm. Courtesy Fondazione Berardelli, Brescia.

Figure 4) Paul De Vree. Amsterdam, 1969. Excerpt from Lotta Poetica no. 2. Milanino sul Garda: Amodulo Edizioni. July 1971 p. 19. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

L'articolo ‘Poesia Visiva: Use a Concrete Mixer.’ The Vanguard Intermediate Poetry in the 60s and 70s sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

My doctoral research has sought to explore how contemporary artists and writers offer ways of thinking about Rome that may differ from conventional ideas about the city. I’m interested in how their practices emerge from the diverse transnational positionalities that bring them to Rome, and how they explore the city as an entangled site of postcolonial or transhuman memories. I began the first year of my PhD by focusing on textual descriptions of the city (for example by Igiaba Scego, Cristina Ubah Ali Farah and Amara Lakhous). But while visiting Rome in person or staying in touch via social media with cultural events there, I started to notice that the transnational approach to the city and its memories that I had identified in texts was not unique to writers: street artists as well as established practitioners (for example, Carrie Mae Weems, FischerelSani and William Kentridge) who have ‘set’ practices in Rome seem to share a similar approach to the city.

This experience of noticing transmedial commonalities across cultural practices recalls the everyday aesthetic experience of “tracing patterns of commonality” across different contexts that Andrew Ginger locates as fundamental to comparative inquiry (Andrew Ginger, “Comparative Study and the Nature of Connections”, Modern Languages Open, 18, 2018). The direction of my thesis emerged from chance meetings that might well not have happened, from the absence of other meetings that could have led it elsewhere. Even though Ginger is concerned with tracing “poetic resemblances” across different linguistic or geographical contexts, this subjective, sense-led approach speaks to the transmedial route that my own research has taken.

Being led by transmedial poetic resemblances doesn’t mean losing appreciation of medial or disciplinary difference but it does mean sometimes consciously overlooking such differences. Sensitivity to sameness means my “psychological journeying” is not so framed by disciplinary difference but is, in Ginger0s terms, “open and indeterminate”. For me this approach has shifted how I see my practice: giving preference to appreciating sameness has encouraged me to be more responsive to my objects of study; it involves being in “continual dialogue with materials […] not knowing quite where the journeying is going to take me” (Ginger). I also find that this approach encourages me to continuously reflect on my singular, embodied and emplaced positionality as a UK-based researcher in Italian Studies, “placing my bod[y] and biograph[y] into critical dialogue” with the objects of my study (Naomi Wells et al, “Ethnography and Modern Languages”, Modern Languages Open, 1, 2019).

In search of transmedial connections outside the frame of disciplinary difference, I’ve developed a deeper awareness of qualities –other than those reflective of their different medial languages – that hold together textual and visual artistic forms, or that hold them apart. In particular, I’ve started thinking about cultural agency; considering cultural practices, in Rita Felski’s terms, as “nonhuman actors” that by giving us ideas “help to modify states of affairs” (Felski, The Limits of Critique, U of Chicago P, 164). While using different medial languages, the performative qualities and thought-provoking intentions shared by the texts and artworks I examine mean that they share an agency to, perhaps, invite us to think differently about Rome and its memories.

L'articolo Tracing Transmedial Sameness sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

For the purposes of my research, which I presented at the Interart/Intermedia conference, Sciascia’s works are particularly interesting, not just because the adoption of an intermedial perspective led him to new narrative solutions, but also for the numerous reflections on the visual he included in his articles, as well as in introductions and prefaces to catalogues and illustrated books. The author’s openness to intermediality arises from his devotion towards every form of figurative art, which he collected passionately. This visual universe poured into his novels and short stories, which are full of images used to give vividness to the writing. In A ciascuno il suo (To each his own) the widow Roscio towers above the Professor like the Nike of Samothrace does to those who climb the stairs of the Louvre, while, in Candido, Paris is described in terms of a comparison with a nude by Courbet. Even book covers and blurbs were chosen carefully by Sciascia to expand and complete the meaning of a story.

I argue here that the artworks owned by Sciascia influenced the genesis of his creative process and that he wrote starting from a certain image that appeared in his mind, translating it later into words. In his essay L’Ordine delle somiglianze (The Order of similarities) dedicated to the 15^th-century painter Antonello da Messina, Sciascia affirms: “Non c’è ordine senza le somiglianze, non c’è conoscenza, non c’è giudizio” (There is no order without similarities, there is no knowledge, there is no judgement). In view of his ideas we can say that the visual dimension for Sciascia is one way to approach reality, and that images, building a cross-reference system, enable him to develop a plot. Indeed, the mind of the author proceeds by associations, because every image produces a series of connections which urge the reader to recall his previous knowledge.

It is interesting to reflect that in his novels paintings help the writer to expand the story, finding similarities between the situations he narrates and the ones represented by other artists. In contrast, in his essays dedicated to the figurative arts, Sciascia often refers to the writers or the characters he loves in order to present a painter or a sculptor. On the one hand, Sciascia considers the interpretation of images as a way to grasp the truth, thus devoting particular attention to visuality in his novels. On the other hand, though, he is also aware of how a fascination with the visual dimension could serve as a temptation to which he should not yield blindly, but rather maintain a critical stance from. In other words, in his work narration and representation go hand in hand, and the development and deepening of these twin devices are part of the uniqueness of Leonardo Sciascia as a novelist.

A Randazzo, 1964 (from: La Sicilia, il suo cuore: omaggio a Leonardo Sciascia, Palermo: Kalós, 2004)

L'articolo Writing in Images: Interartistic Encounters and the Genesis of Creative Writing in Leonardo Sciascia sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Well, it’s a mess. If you have a look at their about page, you will see how Wu Ming’s life is on-line and off-line, in constant interaction with technology – computers, social media, mikes, hiking equipment, (e-)books – and other human beings – readers, activists, other collectives. What role does technology play in all this? This role must not be underestimated or thought of as a mere mastering of a tool by a group of human beings. Wu Ming, as collective subject, as network of collaborative initiatives, would not exist without technology. It actively participates in the performances of the actions that constitute the collective as subject. From the perspective of Karen Barad’s theory of ‘posthuman performativity,’ the creative labour that Wu Ming members perform is the result of a synergy, an assemblage, between human and nonhuman forces. Wu Ming’s agency, no more a mere human attribute but an ongoing performance, as Barad explains, emerges as a negotiation between human and also on-line and off-line nonhuman actors.

What kind of posthuman monstrous thing are you talking about? A different kind of subjectivity, what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘a critical posthuman subject’ (49). Wu Ming are the members of the collective, but they also are more than that, they belong with multiple dimensions – social, political, cultural – on-line and off-line media, networks and experiences. In the twenty years of their activity, Wu Ming has become ‘a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable.’ Wu Ming expresses both an embodied subjectivity – their members – and a network of relations embedded in a transmedia dimension. In this multiple existence, their posthuman subjectivity preserves their accountability, but found it ‘on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building’ (49).

Well done, nice story, but why is it useful? The answer to the question ‘What Wu Ming are?’ is complex, but ethically meaningful. The posthuman answer that I give transforms Wu Ming and their activity in an experience of ethical reflection upon our relationship with the other, human and non-human. This reflection valorises difference, relationality and our being part of collective ensembles, networks of collaboration, human-non-human assemblages. It does not stem from a normative approach to ethics, but from a sense of openness to the human-non-human interaction and the unpredictable outcomes that no human agency can fully control.

References:

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

Braidotti, Rosy. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK; Maiden, USA: Polity P, 2013.

Alessandro Caligaris, La città dei folli (2012)

L'articolo Wu Ming: Boundaries of Human and Posthuman Collaborations sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Being specialized in one subject or field might mean habitually working and operating in what we might define as an academic comfort zone characterized by familiarity with tools and methods, as well as with pre-acquired knowledges and pre-set terminologies. The idea of maintaining a research project within the safe boundaries of a single discipline’s identity can guarantee the researcher the confident use of the tools and the methodologies he/she is accustomed to. A specialized approach allows an in-depth analysis that is crucial for investigating a single discipline or a topic properly and in detail, so as to highlight every particular aspect of a given research area. This mono-disciplinary approach facilitates the specialization of the researcher who is so enabled to become a real expert on the topic under analysis; this results in identifying him/herself as a specialist of a limited, yet clearly defined, field of research within the academic environment.

However, the risks showcased by this approach might include a potentially narrow mindset, lack of innovation and, above all, the stagnancy of an existing status quo. This risk of stagnancy has gravely affected specialised studies where it is not infrequent to come across the same ideas and old-fashioned principles over and over again. What lies inert eventually triggers contempt and boredom. As a matter of fact, the drowsiness of specialisation has condemned it to be viewed with increasing suspicion.

Interdisciplinarity, as an innovative method of inquiry, has instead emerged as a compelling antidote to those problems of specialisation and it seems to be very fashionable in modern academia. Interdisciplinarity promises flexibility, openness to multifaceted and pioneering paths of research, and the acquisition of investigative tools in line with the current global context. As it has been rightly pointed out in Italian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ‘Researchers today find themselves at a unique historical vantage point as a result of gains in interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives […]’ (Brook, Mussgnug & Pieri 2017: 380). In other words, interdisciplinarity represents a new opportunity for researchers to highlight diverse aspects of the same topic by adopting methodologies from different subjects and assuming different perspectives. This approach can be useful to analyse a research theme from a 360-degree perspective, taking note of the complexity of contemporary reality, which is similarly multifaced. Nonetheless, interdisciplinary research risks appearing like a ‘no-man’s land’ in which the researcher inevitably faces the most diverse challenges related to their own identity, terminological ambiguity, and knowledge-superficiality, which might mine the solidity of the final result(s) in the study conducted.

Having acknowledged this, what type of pragmatic issues might an interdisciplinary and multi-medial approach to research cause? One of the outputs of a recent exchange of ideas at the first Interdisciplinary Summer School at Trinity College Dublin evidenced the confusion and common misunderstanding of a plethora of new terms and theories, including cross-border definitions that include different disciplines and media. Because these terms and theories may not have gained universal acceptance yet, researchers find themselves confronting a new challenging when developing terminology, which, while encouraging a dynamic research context, can also be perceived as somewhat unstable. This is especially the case when a research project is suspended between two or more countries, which consequently comprise diverse cultural contexts and points of reference.

In conclusion, it is clear that both approaches – the specialised and the interdisciplinary – have their good points. The dichotomy between a very well-known canonical methodological approach and a truly innovative one, characterized by flexibility and a speculative multiplicity, is complex and cannot be solved here. It represents a new challenge for contemporary and future academic debate, and indeed the ambivalence surrounding the different approaches helps academia to remain vital and active. Hence, the question still remains crucial and, undoubtedly, open to fresh talks.

L'articolo Specialization or Interdisciplinarity? This is the Dilemma… sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

When the Italians remember the Second World War the main events that come to their minds are usually those that occurred in Italy after the 8th of September 1943. During this period, which followed the fall of Mussolini’s regime, the country was invaded by both the Germans and the Allies, and it was torn apart by a Civil War between Fascist and Antifascist supporters. In the decades that followed the end of World War II the two-years period of the Italian Civil War acquired a stable centrality in the Italian memory culture and, despite – or perhaps due to – the lively controversies it generated, it became the centre of the Italian collective memory of the Second World War.

By contrast the legacy of the Axis War, which Italy fought as a Fascist country prior to September 1943, constitutes a completely different scenario. This war has not been the object of stable public commemorations and it has occupied an extremely marginal role in the Italian memory culture. In spite of their marginal importance, memory narratives on the Axis War circulated across Italian society, mainly as a result of cultural products, such as memoirs, novels, short stories, and films, which conveyed to the Italian public representations of this part of the national past.

The cultural production on the Axis War is extremely interesting from an intermedial perspective. Indeed this body of cultural products has been characterised by numerous transmedial phenomena, presenting a series of motif, themes, topoi, and recurrent representations that were not specific of an individual medium, but that reverberated and re-appeared through a variety of cultural artefacts.

Italiani brava gente, dir. by Giuseppe De Santis (Titanus: 1964)

One of the most renowned of these recurrent elements relates to what is usually called the myth of ‘Italiani brava gente’. According to this stereotypical representation, during the Axis War the Italians constituted an army of innocuous and unwarlike soldiers that did not exceed in brutalities and always maintained a humane behaviour towards the local population of the territories it occupied. 

This unfounded representation, which has been largely disproved by recent historiographical enquiries, had a widespread circulation in postwar Italian culture. For instance in best-seller books, such as Mario Rigoni Stern’s Il sergente nella neve (1953) and Giulio Bedeschi’s Mille gavette di ghiaccio (1963), the Italians are never portrayed as perpetrators of wrongdoings. Similarly, in successful books such as Renzo Biasion’s Sagapò (1953), Gian Carlo Fusco’s Le rose del ventennio (1958), and Marcello Venturi’s Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia (1963)
the Italians are presented as non-committed soldiers, who disregarded their military duties, while establishing good relationships with the occupied populations, especially with women. 

Le rose del deserto, dir. by Mario Monicelli (Mikado Film: 2006)

Through the decades this overbearing depiction transmigrated from the pages of these books to the screens of the cinemas, reaching an even broader audience. Films such as Italiani brava gente (1964) directed by Giuseppe De Santis, Mediterraneo by Gabriele Salvadores (1991), and Le rose del deserto by Mario Monicelli (2002) adapted scenes of the Axis War literature and re-proposed to the public the alleged myth of the goodness of the Italians. In these films the Italians are presented as innocuous, often grotesque soldiers, who are never affected by the spirit of violence that characterises warfare.

Through a repeated use of these stereotypical representations, remediated by numerous media, Italian cultural production strengthened the alleged belief of the good-hearted nature of the Italians and, by doing so, conveyed a series of self-absolving representations of Italy’s participation in World War II.

Feature image: Mediterraneo, dir. by Gabriele Salvatores (Penta Film: 1991)

Further Reading:

Angelo Del Boca, Italiani brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005)

Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Filippo Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: la rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2013) 

L'articolo ‘Italiani brava gente’ as a Transmedial Phenomenon sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The interplay between criminology and literature was one of the defining features of late nineteenth-century Italian culture. On the one hand, novelists assimilated and appropriated scientific ideas, while, on the other hand, criminologists engaged with the literary sphere in various ways. The case of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), the founder of the Italian school of positivist criminology, which focused on the physical body of the delinquent in the quest for biological explanations for criminality, is remarkable, and raises interesting questions of intermediality.

Within Lombroso’s criminological work, scientific and literary discourses intertwine and overlap. For instance, in order to prove that a woman’s maternal instincts are stronger than her affection towards her husband, he presents five literary examples of how easily widows remarry, including Shakespeare in Richard III. The criminologist does not simply cite literary works to validate his own scientific conclusions, but he enacts a process which we could call the ‘Gothicization of science’. Gothic narratives of criminal transgression are central in his construction of the concept of criminal deviance.

An excellent example is Lombroso’s famous description of the autopsy of the born-criminal Giuseppe Vilella, originally performed in 1871. Firstly, he employs the motif of metaphoric enlightenment – ‘this was [… a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal’ – which may remind of the ‘flash of light’ that bursts in upon Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818). Secondly, he describes the criminal as ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity’, which include ‘the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, drink its blood’. Here, Lombroso seems to associate the born-criminal with the literary vampire, a Gothic creature that re-emerged in the late nineteenth century in novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Arguably in the attempt to reach a larger audience, Lombroso uses narrative techniques and incorporates in his supposedly purely scientific writing many of the trappings of literary and visual Gothicism. Ultimately, this contributes to fictionalising his texts. In this respect, intermediality is understood in the sense of intermedial references, which constitute, as explained by Rajewski, specific strategies that contribute to the media product’s overall signification. Precisely like those novelists who operate a musicalization of a literary text, or try to imitate certain film techniques in literature, Lombroso evokes elements and structures of a distinct medium – the literary Gothic – always through the use of its own media-specific means – the conventions of science.

Whilst there is no border-crossing as such, Lombroso’s essentially literary prose affects the scientific quality of his works. It comes as no surprise that many contemporary scientists criticized him because he tended to privilege the imaginative over the scientific. His texts, along with those of other Italian positivist criminologists who equally engaged with literature – including Enrico Ferri’s I delinquenti nell’arte (1896); Bernardino Alimena’s Il delitto nell’arte (1899); and Scipio Sighele’s Letteratura tragica (1906) – may thus be fruitful to uncover the extent to which, by the end of the century, literary elements and Gothic strands had become functional components of criminological writing.

References:

Hiller, Jonathan R. 2013. ‘Lombroso and the Science of Literature and Opera’. The Cesare Lombroso Handbook, ed. by Paul Kneper and P.J. Ystehede. London: Routledge.

Lombroso, Cesare. 1911. Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: Putnam.

Pittard, Cristopher, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, London, Routledge, 2011

Rajewsky, Irina. 2005. ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality’, Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, 6:43-64.

Rippl, Gabriele. 2015. ‘Introduction’. Handbook of Intermediality. Literature, Image, Sound, Music, ed. by Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter.

L'articolo Intermediality and Criminological Writing sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.