This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach, in order to contribute to aspects of Comparative Literature, Ecocriticism, Cultural Studies and Food Studies, as well as to make two important contributions to Italian Studies. First, to Italian literature of the Resistance which, although well established within Italian studies, has received surprisingly little attention with regard to the influence of peasant support in the success of the Resistance during World War II. Second, my ecocritical approach represents a relatively new specialization within Italian Studies, an approach that considers the ways in which human actions are strictly related to, and dependent upon, the natural environments in which they take place.

This dissertation offers also a reinterpretation of the concept of the organic intellectual as proposed by Gramsci, so as to better understand the relationship between peasants and the progressive Italian intellectual class that emerged after WWII. I conclude that after WWII, conversely to what Gramsci claims in his famous essay, The Formation of the Intellectuals, peasants create their organic intellectuals.

My reading proposes a more active vision of the peasant, and offers to Italian Studies, Comparative Literature and ecocriticism new instruments by which to interpret peasant culture and tradition. Through the authors presented in my chapters, I highlight a mode of thinking, a culture in terms of peasant tradition, and a way of more specifically valuing the often-clouded relationship between humans and their natural surroundings. By analyzing these authors, I determine the methods by which the Resistance and peasant traditions left a legacy, clearly present in contemporary forms of activism, which are related to food and agriculture. To this purpose, I considered it fundamental to use an approach that would encompass both theory and practice in which peasant culture, concerns of sustainability, and the recent forms of activism related to farming, food, and environment are all related and interconnected.

In March 2014 we collaborated on a common cultural project, hosting the visit of three activists from Italy—Stefano Liberti, Andrea Segre, and Dagmawi Yimer—to our respective universities in California. As filmmakers and reporters in a variety of media, the three of them engage with contemporary human rights abuses connected to Italy’s involvement in the control of Mediterranean migration. In our respective programs we screened one or more of their documentaries with Liberti, Segre, and Yimer in attendance and in dialogue with the spectators:  A Sud di Lampedusa (2006), about migrants in sub-Saharan Africa trying to reach Libya to find employment; Come un uomo sulla terra (2008), about the difficult trajectory traversed by Yimer and many of his compatriots from Ethiopia to Italy via Sudan and Libya; Mare chiuso (2012), about Italy and the EU’s pushback policies following a number of controversial decrees enacted by Berlusconi’s government in cahoots with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi; and Và pensiero (2013), about two vicious incidents of racism directed at African immigrants in Florence and Milan.

Ideally, and perhaps idealistically, we wanted to engage students, colleagues and local communities in a transnational dialogue across continents on issues that are global, and which are as much about biopolitics and ethics as they are about poetics and aesthetics. Formerly the site of multiple European and American colonial and imperialist conquests, California is a state that has been traversed and transformed historically and physically by different waves of migration. As such, it offered each of us, through our respective geographical and cultural points of belonging, the opportunity to engage the work of Liberti, Segre, and Yimer from a variety of perspectives and refraction points.

We believe that a theoretical and aesthetic discussion of the films must be accompanied by a reflection on our locations, our academic work, and our pedagogical practices. Precisely because we welcomed our guests at both public and private institutions, with different missions, objectives, and audiences, we find it compelling to examine the various permutations and kinds of reception that these presentations produced. This essay, therefore also addresses the role that collaboration plays not only in organizing events of such magnitude and import, but also in providing pedagogical and scholarly advantages for us as intellectuals and for students who are the recipients of such practices. Our collaboration has forced us to consider, among other things, why broader academic exchanges such as ours do not happen more frequently, and to explore the material and intellectual obstacles that render such collaborations rare, not simply in Italian Studies, but in the humanities in general, across campuses and colleges.