This essay examines historically varied tales of transnational migration through the lens of a topos that links nineteenth-century Italian migrations to Egypt, with the representation of an Italian infiltration of “Little Cairo” in Amara Lakhous’s 2010 novel Divorzio all’islamica in Viale Marconi: the topos of European Christians who pose or pass as Muslim. This essay proposes a contrapuntal reading between two historical moments and two directions of Italian migrations. It first takes up the case of Giovanni Finati, Ferrarese, who converted to Islam and passed as Albanian in Muhammed Ali’s para-colonial Egypt, as recounted in his 1830 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati. This essay then shows how Lakhous reprises Orientalism’s practice of representation by updating the powerful nineteenth- century metaphor of the Orient as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe” (in Edward Said’s fortunate phrase). Among the particularly rich repertoire of plays upon that stage was the practice of passing and posing as Muslim in order to enter the sacred space of Mecca, prohibited to Christians upon threat of death. In its nineteenth-century version, such passing was the sign of the extraordinary man, alone at Mecca among a sea of authentic, and supposedly “transparent” believers. Lakhous, instead, takes up the topos in order to generalize it as the condition of post-colonial Italian identities, whether “migrant” or “italiano doc,” as the novel calls them: “un italiano al cento percento, un italianissimo” The theme and possibility of conversion to Islam links the two historical moments in an embrace that conjures with Islamophobia, the historical malleability of a weak national identity in the Mediterranean, and the frisson of entry into a forbidden space in a disguise that is in equal measure linguistic and semiotic.

This dissertation explores the relationship between Italian cinema and the United States’ imagery and bodily practices in the years between the fascist regime and the Italian “economic miracle.” I analyze objects such as magazines, consumer goods and design furniture, the conditions of their consumption and production, and their presence in Italian films – from Mario Camerini’s What Scoundrels Men Are! (1932), to Alberto Lattuada’s Without Pity (1948), and Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim (1965). Across different historical contexts and cultural products I examine the arc from Italy’s infatuation with “America,” to disillusionment. These two extremes are epitomized by the emulation of Hollywood stars during the fascist ventennio, as embodied by women’s magazines, all the way to the rejection of serial design furniture on the part of students protesting against American designers at a Milan Triennale exhibition in 1968. In between these two periods, the end of World War II and the Allies’ “liberation” brought about the physical exchange and contact between Italian civilians and US soldiers and consumer goods, partly thanks to the Marshall Plan. I argue that seriality – a mode of production and consumption, as well as an aesthetics – binds together the periods under analysis, is the engine for this exchange, and acts upon the portrayal and interpellation of women (actresses, readers and spectators) according to a precise visual grammar and narrative, rooted in Hollywood’s spectacle.

Thanks to the exploration of films, magazines, and archival material, I observe the clear-cut break between fascist cinema (the so-called “telefoni bianchi”), and the “year zero” of neorealism under the lens of consumption and the presence of the United States. I then advance a hypothesis of continuity between the two periods, and between the aftermath of fascism and World War II, and the economic miracle. Framed by a new idea of continuity, the work of directors such as Camerini, Lattuada, and Petri, as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni, sustains my larger claim about Italian art and film’s historiography. These directors are joined, during the years of the economic miracle, by visual artists such as Ettore Sottsass and Giosetta Fioroni, mapping the birth of a specialized branch: industrial design. Following its heyday in the early and late 1960s, the new industry deflated on its own premises by the beginning of the next decade, carrying along, and away, the myth of America.

The year 1968 saw the rise of a manifold protest movement among Italian university students that evolved well into the late 1970s and spread to all segments of society. Today, the memory of this collective experience represents one of the most haunting episodes of the 20th century. Torn between celebrating national events and giving in to cultural amnesia, the Italian cultural discourse around ’68 appears deliberately opaque. In recent historiography, fiction, and film this momentous year appears to be condensed in a puzzle of contrasting snapshots that do not fit well together. On one hand, it is remembered as a watershed event that altered the course of the nation’s history and the lives of individuals in radical ways. On the other hand, many ’68 storytellers mourn the complete erasure of their experience from contemporary culture and criticize the moral wasteland that is associated with the current political arena when contrasted with the vanished hopes of the past. From Luisa Passerini to Guido Viale, from Erri De Luca to Giovanni Moro, a generation of protagonists and witnesses of those times raise through their work a number of urgent questions that deal with issues of periodization, selective perception, genealogical inheritance, and a paralyzing feeling of melancholia. Such questions do not seem to find answers within traditional historical or sociological approaches. At the same time, these accounts pose problems of their own, as they reflect a desire to simultaneously preserve and shatter the memory of 1968 as it has come to be celebrated in popular culture.

My dissertation is in dialogue with a vast intellectual constellation that encompasses historical, theoretical, literary, and cinematic readings of 1968. As I investigate the existing narrative production around the ’68 phenomenon, I question what lies at the heart of the possessive forms of memory that have come to characterize our present approach to that time. In doing so, I challenge the current widespread view that sees possessive memory as an obstacle to a proper understanding of the past. On the contrary, I argue that it is precisely by looking closer at the stumbling blocks that seem to hinder the flow of historical narrative surrounding ’68 that we might get at the core of our collective attachment to that time, a bond that is shaped by the labor of forces and emotions that cannot yet be put to rest. My research pays particular attention to the ways in which the memory of ’68 has been defiantly organized at the narrative level as an attempt to resist periodization. Thus, I interpret such resistance as a way to protract the presence of ’68 beyond its temporal confines and ultimately deny the symbolic death of a groundbreaking collective experience. Through the analysis of the narrative figuration of the ghost, I explore the ways in which melancholia — the feeling of painful attachment to a lost ideal — can be taken to be an affirmative disposition that originates a form of critical agency on the part of the ’68 storytellers. The imperative need “to begin with oneself” — to impose the primacy of subjective affect, understanding one’s involvement in social phenomena as the merging of individual and collective expression — becomes a melancholic act of rebellion against the objectifying discourse of history. From this perspective, I take 1968 to be reactivated as a temporal category against which the present needs to be questioned in order for a future to be imagined anew.

In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010 maps the "elsewheres"--spatial, temporal and intertextual-- that authorize same-sex desire in modern Italy. Tracing a genealogy that spans from nineteenth century travel writing about Italy to contemporary Italian novels, I argue that texts exported from the Northern Europe and the U.S. function as vital site of affiliation and vexing points of discrepancy for Italy's queers. Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Camere separate (1989), for instance, cites the British novelist Christopher Isherwood as proof that - somewhere else - silence did not yoke homosexuality. Rather than defining sexuality as a constant set of desires, I demonstrate it to be a retroactive fiction. It is the fleeting affinity that the reading of inherited texts can evoke. In examining the reception of transnational gay narratives in the national context of Italy, this dissertation argues that the concept of "Western" homosexuality is internally riven. Ultimately, In a Queer Place in Time illuminates how local histories - including affective differences like shame, estrangement and backwardness - continue to haunt gay culture's global fictions.

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This dissertation marks out a modernist counter-tradition, analyzing a set of texts that locate critical potential in outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms. I show that such an anachronism, common to Italian and English-language literary culture and, later, cinema, organizes works by Walter Pater, Giovanni Pascoli, James Joyce, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Glauber Rocha. All of these figures, I argue, oppose ideologies of progress by returning to the Latin class long since left behind by progressive educators.

Across the political spectrum, modernizing reformers claimed that old-school education, often disparagingly called “instruction,” had become a dead weight, an impediment to progress. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Dewey and Giovanni Gentile, these theorists declared instruction obsolete, deemed it empty, mechanical, infantilizing, and futile. Time and again, the discourse of progressive education targeted Latin in particular; the dead language—taught through such time-tested means as recitation, memorization, copying out, and corporal punishment—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint.

By contrast, the authors I study look to instruction’s techniques precisely, and they find unlikely resources for a critique of modernity in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away. Registering the past’s persistence, these authors themselves persist in what look like most retrograde attachments—to tradition, transmission, scholastic rites, and repetitive verbal forms. But the pedagogies of constraint that they devise—pedagogies that I call “counter-progressive”—repeat the past to radical effect.

Thus, against his own early liberal tendencies and a backdrop of broad educational reforms, Pater assigns “mechanical exercise” in his late essays, lectures, and fiction. Pascoli’s Paedagogium makes the case for the embattled classical school, complementing the author’s defense of this school against a range of reformist detractors. Joyce re-imagines the pensum, or punitive copying of text, as a literary form in “Oxen of the Sun,” and Pasolini’s Salò radicalizes other instructional rites. Rocha’s Claro, finally, marks the limits of the counter-progressive pedagogy that it continues, returning, like all of the works I consider, to school, to Rome, and to a history that it cannot escape.

Melodrama manifests itself in a variety of forms – as a film and theatre practice, as a discursive category, as a mode of imagination. This dissertation discusses film melodrama in its visual, gestural, and aural manifestations. My focus is on the persistence of melodrama and the traces it leaves on post-World War II Italian cinema: from the Neorealist canon of the 1940s to works that engage with the psychological and physical, private, and collective traumas after the experience of a totalitarian regime (Cavani’s Il portiere di notte, 1974), to postmodern Viscontian experiments set in a 21st-century capitalist society (Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, 2009). The aural dimension is fundamental as an opening to the epistemology of each film. I pay particular attention to the presence of operatic music – as evoked directly or through semiotic displacement involving the film’s aesthetic and expressive figures – and I acknowledge the existence of a long legacy of practical and imaginative influences, infiltrations and borrowings between the screen and the operatic stage in the Italian cinematographic tradition. In doing so, I challenge the theoretical bias that associates melodrama with a reliance on grandiose theatrical settings, clichéd symphonic soundtracks, Manichean narrative tropes, redundancy and excess.

My contribution to the understanding of cinematic melodrama encompasses two main dimensions. First, I show how the melos in films is crucial to the epistemological structure of every film, rather than a separate or ancillary entity. Whereas realist cinema and melodrama are usually regarded as opposites or antagonists, realism in fact relies on melodramatic aural and gestural figures to fashion its reality effects. Second, my investigation contributes to an understanding of melodrama, in its visual and aural manifestations, both as a mode and as a discourse – a system of mutually enlightening relationships that are influenced by and, in turn, can influence historical and social changes.

The crime genre, more familiarly referred to in Italian as the giallo, thrives in Italy and finds it origins in the late nineteenth-century popular novel or romanzo d'appendice. This dissertation groups together four twentieth and twenty-first century Italian novels written by women that elicit the crime genre only to then short-circuit it. Rather than placing them within the revisionist subgenre `Feminist crime fiction,' I suggest that these novels are radical in that they stage their own withdrawal from a gendered structure of knowledge inhabited and engendered by the crime novel: an epistemology that leaves them unthought. Indeed, these novels must leave the genre behind in order to pursue the construction of a female site of knowledge and the possibility of a female knower. In creating space for alternate, experimental discourses, these narratives rethink the relation between epistemology and gender, epistemology and narrative, epistemology and the body, and epistemology and the maternal by returning to, and rewriting, stories of origin so as to begin again and know differently.

“Situating Lives” bridges the study of autobiography and social theory to demonstrate how, since at least the mid-twentieth century, hybrid forms of narration have used personal experiences to advance critical arguments. In contrast to the scholarly tradition that tends to cast self-analysis as a form of narcissistic confession, this dissertation examines autobiographical texts that foreground social groups and generations across six decades of French and Italian literature. Through historical contextualization and careful analysis of works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Luisa Passerini, Annie Ernaux, and Edoardo Albinati, I argue that the emphasis contemporary life-writing places on social relations attests to a revised understanding of critique, whereby discursive modes of social introspection offer new alternatives to universalist paradigms. The autobiographers-critics discussed herein address social phenomena in their personal narratives based on the internal knowledge they gained as individuals situated within a community. This shift from detachment to immanence in experimental life-writing challenges hierarchical models of political commitment, illustrating how critique is a democratic activity that results from self-understanding.

Key to the personal narratives investigated in this study is the way in which these writers represent and interpret social bonds. Each of the four chapters addresses the relationship between collective autobiography and social critique by focusing on the creative modes in which these authors imagine society and intervene in its dynamics. Taking his bourgeois childhood as an example, Sartre casts light on the social grammar that, embodied in everyday practices, intimates to individuals how to relate to one another. In her generational self-portrait, Passerini interrogates the ideological and linguistic mediations that shape both personal experiences and their narration. As she recounts her parents’ life and her own, Ernaux grapples with questions of visibility and agency in low-income milieus, in search of ways to de-singularize the “I” and foster social belonging. In turn, Albinati meditates upon the widespread practices of masculine domination at play in his Catholic education. Such an introspective exercise prompts the author to assess available forms of accountability and social unity within a community fractured by gender violence. Taken together, these chapters point to the richness of critical practices that emerge from situated thinking, as well as to the ambivalences that can arise in interpreting and attempting to reimagine one’s place in society. While accounting for the inseparable ties between individuals and communities, these autobiographers suggest that writing about one’s life means not only engaging with its contexts, but also unfolding its critical implications.

This dissertation examines the engagement of post-1989 Italian cinema with (im)migration from the global south and multiculturalism in Italy within Europe. Focusing on a selection of films from 1990 to 2010, I argue that Italian cinema of immigration is constructed and maintained through constant erasures of Italian histories and desires. As films of social engagement, cinema of immigration is about the “here” and the “now,” namely Italian problems after the end of the Cold War. However, it also operates within older and broader frameworks, engaging different aspects of Italian/European society, history and culture. This dissertation unfolds those aspects and articulates connections between Italian cinema of immigration, Italy’s misremembered colonial past, neorealism, Europe’s project of supra-national integrations, and economic networks of exchange.

Despite the fact that the cinema of immigration has become one of the most recognizable ‘sub-genres’ of Italian cinema since Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990), scholarship on this subject is relatively recent and still taking shape. For that reason, the first half of my dissertation examines the history of Italian cinema, and engages the points of contact between the mobility of people and the moving image. In my introductory chapter, I historicize the representation of racialized others by focusing on certain key moments of interplay between the spectacular and the real, scenes that demonstrate the endurance of Italian orientalist ideologies. I then focus on the rhetorical move of equating immigrants from the global south with Italian migrants from the postwar era, and argue that even though the analogy was mobilized to create a sense of empathy, those representations are actually based on pre-existing models of alienation and discrimination. The second half of my research looks to Europe and beyond, and situates Italian cinema of immigration within synchronic networks. For example, my third chapter looks at the global circulation of the cinema of migration, and shows that seeming peripheral networks of distribution are, in fact, central to its existence. My final chapter compares English, French and German accented cinemas, which is the production of first and second-generation immigrant filmmakers, in order to postulate the existence of an Italian accented cinema and delineate its possible, though constantly changing, and contours.