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Antonio Gramsci's The Southern Question remains as provocative
today as it was when it was written. During ten years of political
imprisonment under Mussolini's Fascist government, Gramsci produced
The Prison Notebooks, a continued meditation on subjects and
relationships first proposed within the pages of this essay. The
purpose in re-introducing the essay is to emphasize how Gramsci's
analysis of social stratification of Northern and Southern Italy in
1926 is relevant to current discussions about state formation,
diasporas, and strategic alliances.
Working toward an analysis of the influence of photography on the
construction of an Italian "type" to serve the mandates of the new
nation in the 1860s, this book engages the work of writers and
photographers who have addressed or participated in this venture.
From Giovanni Verga and Italo Calvino's writings to the conceptual
visual philosophy of Tommaso Campanella and Luigi Ghirri's
photography. From the Arcadic gaze of Baron von Gloeden to Tina
Modotti's revolutionary vision, the works analyzed in this book
have all contributed in shaping our contemporary visual vocabulary.
And, while Italy is at the center of my considerations, the ideas
that populate this work are in many ways globally applicable and
relevant. Looters, Photographers, and Thieves seeks to contribute
to the fascinating discourse on the photographic image and its
specific uses in the representation of racial, ethnic and gender
difference, and suggest how the isolation of images according to
the dictates of power relations might influence and condition ways
of seeing. Finally, this book is meant as a locus where the images
produced in the shaping of notions of citizenship and cultural
relevance in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy might reveal
the processes of the imaginary. As such, the arguments and images
in each chapter thread through each other to propose ways by which
to approach disparate subjects and forms in order to envision
photographers themselves as seers rather than gazers.
The essays in this volume provide a theorization of what we might
call the "denatured" wild, in other words a notion of environmental
"restoration" or "reinhabitation" that recognizes and reconfigures
the human factor as an interdependent entity. Acknowledging the
contributions of Marco Armerio, Serenella Iovino, Giovanna
Ricoveri, Patrick Barron and Anna Re among others, Ecocritical
Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild
negotiates the ground within the historicizing, theoretical
perspectives, and surveying spirit of these writers. Despite the
central role that nature has played in Italian culture and
literature, there has been an evident lack of critical approaches
free of the bridles of the socio-political manipulations of
nationalism. The authors in this collection, by recognizing the
groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, challenge the
narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminates the
complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that reveals a rich
environmentally engaged literary and cultural tradition.
This volume explores the Italian contribution to the current global
phenomenon of a "return to reality" by examining the country's rich
cultural production in literature and cinema. The focus is
particularly on works from the period spanning the Nineties to the
present day which offer alternatives to notions of reality as
manufactured by the collusion between the neo-liberal state and the
media. The book also discusses Italy's relationship with its own
cultural past by investigating how Italian authors deal with the
return of the specter of Neorealism as it haunts the modern
artistic imagination in this new epoch of crisis. Furthermore, the
volume engages in dialogue with previous works of criticism on
contemporary Italian realism, while going beyond them in devoting
equal attention to cinema and literature. The resulting
interactions will aid the reader in understanding how the critical
arts respond to the triumph of hyperrealism in the current era of
the virtual spectacle as they seek new ways to promote cognitive
transformations and foster ethical interventions.
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