The Divisionists were a loosely associated group of late nineteenth-century painters intent on creating a distinctly Italian avant-garde. They strove to override current anxieties about backwardness and cultural fragmentation in the recently established, but disconnected, Italian kingdom with a mission underpinned by modernist and nationalist aspirations. Although most of the movements’ members aligned themselves with the political left and were anticlerical, almost all produced canvases with religious or mystical overtones, sometimes undertaking to paint specifically holy subjects. The sources for the majority of these images lay in medieval and Renaissance art. This confluence of a Positivist painting technique (for Divisionism drew on scientific theories of chromatics and optics) and radical politics with anti-materialist and sacred themes, and modern art with historical prototypes, albeit paradoxical, was not an altogether surprising phenomenon in the 1890s, the decade when Symbolist art and revivalist trends thrived and spiritualism and science overlapped. Focusing on their sacred works, this essay explores the cultural context within which the Divisionists pursued spirituality and expressed metaphysical and transcendent ideas. It also demonstrates how the Divisionists negotiated the polarities of tradition and progress present in the post-Unification era and recognized that once they reinterpreted and recast their antecedents’ religious art and Catholic narratives with an empirical painting method and modernist strategies, they could forge new icons of spirituality and respond to nationalist exigencies.

This essay examines two films by Kevin Jerome Everson: Rhinoceros (2013) and Rhino (2017). Rhinoceros is an imagined staging of the last speech of the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici (1510-1537), also known as the first black European head of state due to his mixed Italian and African ancestry. For de’ Medici’s speech, Rhinoceros uses one of the last communiqués of Mummar al-Gaddafi, then recently deposed as head of the Libyan state by the Arab Spring. Once staunchly anti-imperialist, Gaddafi’s last years were marked by new political and economic relations with Western nations, notably the 2008 “friendship treaty” orchestrated with then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. By having de’ Medici speak the words of one of the most polarizing African leaders of the last forty years, Rhinoceros merges the politics of early modern Italy with the country’s colonial legacies in north and east Africa. Rhino imagines the final days leading up to Duke Alessandro’s 1537 assassination, with de’ Medici’s narrative told alongside interviews with African migrants in present-day Florence. In Rhino, the historic presence of Africans within the Italian peninsula is paralleled to contemporary African migration to Italy. I argue Rhinoceros and Rhino not only reveal the ironies of postcolonial Italy at the beginning of the 21^st century, but also participates in the construction of the archive of Black Italy.

Shorebirds often feed in multispecies groups that display interesting niche dynamics. On Moorea, French Polynesia, the Wandering Tattler (Tringa incana) and Pacific Golden Plover (Pluvialis fulva) are the dominant shorebird species during the northern winter. These species’ feeding behavior was observed at the Temae estuary on the northeast side of the island. Relative abundance of the two species was determined using transect counts at the estuary and an adjacent beach. T. incana displayed more striking and sprinting behavior, while P. fulva displayed more picking and walking behavior. T. incana also consumed more crabs than P. fulva. The two species existed in relatively equal abundance in the estuary; T. incana was more common on the beach. Though these data suggest some differences in feeding niche, a great deal of overlap was observed. The degree of niche partitioning appears to be greater in this study than in similar studies conducted on these species’ breeding grounds.