Past events

Family history, migration and photography in some recent Italian women’s novels

Speaker: Giorgia Alù
Date: Thursday 4 September 2008
Time: 4.15 pm
Venue: Room 724 Brennan MacCallum A18

Narrative texts that aim to reconstruct personal history, family history and biographies very often resort to the use of photographs. In many cases the process of writing is activated by looking at an old photographic image. At other times, the writing is inspired by oral stories or written documents, but a visual image is needed in order to identify, appropriate and document scenes and faces known through other people’s narration. In so doing, light is cast on an anonymous or forgotten photograph found in an archive or in a family album which is thereby given a personal meaning and a new story by the text.

This paper aims to explore the use of photographs in some recent hybrid books about family history and Italian migration by Italian women writers. It will look mainly at the way random and often anonymous visual representations of loss and dislocation are appropriated by the author and added to her story. It will be argued that rather than employing these images to support a reconstruction of her fragmented family past, the author uses them for identity performances, parental reconciliation, as well as in a search for blood connections and origins.

Giorgia Alù is Cassamarca Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests cover travel writing, representations of Southern Italy, the relationship between literature and photography and women's writing. Her book Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Women Writing in Sicily, 1848-1910 (Oxford/New York: Peter Lang) has just been published.

New images of immigrants and Italians in contemporary Italian film
Luana Ciavola at the University of Sydney
22 May 2008

In this presentation, Luana Ciavola will analyse how the return of the director Francesco Maselli to his politically engaged cinema with the film Civico 0 (2007) and the work of the emerging director Carmine Amoroso with Cover Boy (2005) substantiate a recent trend in Italian cinema to represent immigrants and Italians as similar, embodying the status of ‘outsider’ and ‘other’ within Italian social reality.

In these two films immigrants and Italians are both represented as marginalized from the society and, as such, they are alienated within an Italy that, in turn, is represented as a ‘foreign’ country to both these groups. In these films the immigrant is represented as the ‘other’ who according to Kristeva, “confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other” (Kristeva, 1991, p. 13). The otherness of the immigrant challenges Italian society and reveals the existence of an ‘other’ within it, that is, the immigrant himself and the poor Italian, both socially and psychologically.

The Casualisation of Love: Emotions, the Economy and Employment in
Contemporary Italy
Paolo Bartoloni at UTS
8 May 2008

It is obvious that the question of how we love and what we mean by love in post-industrial societies cannot be separated from the question of how we work and what we mean by work (Kipnis, 2003). The very transformation of workplace semantics, stressing the significance of notions such as “no long term”, and employment strategies such as those based on the value of “weak ties” (Sennett, 1998) appear to be directly transferable to the emotional sphere. If it is true that we are in the age of “impatient capital” (Sennett, 1998), meaning the desire for rapid returns, it might also be true that we are in the age of “impatient love”, meaning the demand for quickly gratifying and consuming passion.

This lecture is the second of two on the evening on the theme Love and Lust and is part of the Articul8te seminar series at UTS. For further information and directions, please follow this link.

Fabricating Images: Jews, Clothing and the Sistine Ceiling
Professor Barbara Wisch at the University of Sydney
Thursday 5 April 2008

The Ancestors of Christ in the Sistine Ceiling traditionally have been viewed in a negative light–belonging to “the sphere of shadow and death”–in large part due to their murky tonality before the cleaning of the 1980s. The renewed visibility of the Ancestors has engendered much discussion, with several scholars proposing more positive interpretations. However, within this discourse a significant marker has been overlooked: Michelangelo placed a yellow, circular badge–the Jewish “sign” as it was called in papal decrees and city statutes–on the left shoulder of Aminadab, located prominently in the lunette above the papal throne. This illustrated presentation explores the implications of this sign as a quintessential indicator of demeaned status in a society that demarcated Jews by imposing degrading dress codes, legislated their role as moneylenders, and subjected them to humiliating public spectacles.

Barbara Wisch is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York College at Cortland. She is currently Visiting Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney.

Mediterraneo: Mare Nostrum or New Frontier? The theme of the Sea in the New Italian Migration Literature
M. Cristina Mauceri at the Italian Institute of Culture
Friday 23 November 2007

From the Mare Nostrum of Antiquity, which allowed exchanges and sharing of experiences between distant people, with the intensification of migration movements the Mediterranean has become a new frontier. In her talk, M. Cristina Mauceri, Cassamarca Lecturer at the University of Sydney, will discuss the theme of the see in the narratives of authors who write in Italian and live in Italy although they were borne elsewhere.