Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-06-07DOI: 10.1177/00145858231175143
M. Sinha, Pratyush Bibhakar
{"title":"Locating pitfalls in the EU gender equality policy","authors":"M. Sinha, Pratyush Bibhakar","doi":"10.1177/00145858231175143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231175143","url":null,"abstract":"While the project of the European Union (EU) incorporated gender equality as one of its foundational objectives and its institutions have been mandated to integrate gender equality into all of their policy areas, the EU has fallen short of materializing these objectives. Gender inequality at the EU level is perpetuated through a process in which the EU, as a structure anchored in economic considerations, interfaces with androcentric institutions and member states. This substantially determines the policy instruments, tools and mechanisms within and outside its periphery, rendering ‘gender’ to be co-opted, secondary and subdued policy areas. While the discourse on gender equality policy has evolved through ‘equal opportunity’, ‘positive action’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’ approaches, the policies mostly focus on auxiliary benefits such as maternity leave, childcare services and part-time work, aiming to assist women in reconciling their work and life situations. These benefits do not substantially transform conventional gender roles within the family or at the social-economic and political levels, which to a large extent perpetuate gender inequality at large. This article analyses the trajectory of gender equality policy at the EU, the inherent factors and processes that constantly define and determine it and how it implicates the larger EU policy discourse. Using a feminist standpoint, the article explores the extent to which the new female leadership in the EU has prioritized and problematized gender equality with corresponding initiatives and actions, and the major challenges it may face in contemporary times in order to meet its objectives. To this end, some existing labour market and family policies are taken up as case studies. Various EU policy documents, key EIGE reports, press releases and other existing literature have been used as reference points for the analysis.","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43452819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-06-07DOI: 10.1177/00145858231180144
Mark Pietralunga
{"title":"Book review: Anthony Julian Tamburri, A Politics of [Self-]Omission: The Italian/American Challenge in a Post-George Floyd Age","authors":"Mark Pietralunga","doi":"10.1177/00145858231180144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231180144","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47015473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/00145858231177066
Loredana Polezzi
{"title":"Translating, repositioning, reframing: On the transatlantic routes of objects and memories","authors":"Loredana Polezzi","doi":"10.1177/00145858231177066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231177066","url":null,"abstract":"Methods, objects and subjects My contribution to this forum on “Practices of Belonging” has a double focus. On the one hand, it concentrates on the multiple trajectories that histories of migration trace as they cross and re-cross the Atlantic, connecting the history of Italy and the US, in particular, via the stories of multiple departures and returns. On the other, it asks what it means to research material which is close to one’s own subjective experience and personal history, or what “positionality” means when we are faced with the political, ethical, and affective demands of migrant narratives. There is a tension, inherent in working with the stories, the narratives of others’ lives, which often also implicate our own. In that tension, becoming conscious of our own implications (Rothberg, 2019), we both make and unmake our practices as “experts,” “scholars,” “specialists”—and we also build and dismantle our “authority.” Similarly, reflecting on these issues has two intersecting purposes. It aims to contribute to ongoing discussion about research method and research positioning in the field of Modern Languages, conjoining questions about the role of translation and (auto)ethnography in disciplinary research practices (Burdett et al., 2020; Wells et al., 2019) with observations on the way personal experience and ethical choices influence how we select, carry out, and narrate our investigations (Pugliese, 2019; Ricatti, 2022; Spadaro, 2020). At the same time, I intend to discuss the mobility of cultural products by following the complex, non-linear translational layering of production, circulation, and reception processes—what Felce (2021) calls “multitudinous translation”—and how that mobility, which is at the heart of a transnational approach to Italian culture (Bond, 2014; Burdett and Polezzi, 2020), can help us to overcome the silos structure and the hierarchies implicit in labels such as “Italian Studies,” “Italian American Studies,” and other such formulas. In this sense, it is also important to remember that","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44686235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172781
S. Ziolkowski
{"title":"Italian ghetto stories: Toward a transnational literary history","authors":"S. Ziolkowski","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172781","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Italian ghetto stories, which are distinguished by confusions of time, continuities, tourism, reflections on collective identities, and movements in and out, in order to outline one potential literary history. In contrast to German-language and Anglophone literary ghettos, Italian ones are generally absent as a critical category from literary debates, though they appear in works by Leon Modena, Israel Zangwill, Rainer Maria Rilke, Umberto Saba, Giorgio Bassani, Elsa Morante, Caryl Phillips, and Igiaba Scego, among others. A transnational approach can bring together works that have not been considered collectively because of disciplinary formations. Italian ghetto fictions expose the disheartening continuities of prejudice and, relatedly, have generally not been considered together because of restrictive ideas about the nation as an organizing principle.","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47023498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-05-31DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172925
Andrea Ciribuco
{"title":"Multilingualism and activism in Italian studies","authors":"Andrea Ciribuco","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172925","url":null,"abstract":"Near the end of his life, linguist and anthropologist Jan Blommaert gave an interview where he looked back at his career, and at what he had learned about the role of language in society. Talking about his time as a university student in 1980s Belgium, he tells an anecdote that I have started to mention often in my classes. Blommaert recalls opening a book of ‘useful’ phrases in five African languages, as an eager student, just to find phrases like ‘get my car out of the mud’, ‘get your boss’ or ‘lazy people will be punished’ (Docwerkers, 2021). The book, written under the pretence of helping beginners learn new languages, was obviously steeped in a colonial mentality: its intended readers were students of languages, but they were also expected to hold political and economic power over the native speakers of the languages themselves. I have come to use Blommaert’s anecdote to discuss with my students (potentially, future language professionals) how any use of language is never ‘innocent’ and never disconnected from relations of power within and across societies. In specific contexts, speakers of certain languages (like English or Spanish) have socio-economic advantages over speakers of other languages (like Wolof or Quechua). Many languages have standard varieties and/or high prestige accents which afford concrete advantages to their users. That ‘is a problem not just of difference, but of inequality’ (Blommaert, 2010: 3). Language, in fact, holds the power to reinforce or subvert the architecture of society. My role as a teacher and researcher in Italian studies depends largely on the perceived ‘usefulness’ of my native language in a global marketplace, together with the perceived ‘importance’ of certain canonical works of Italian literature and art. My very status as a native speaker of Italian rests partly on my linguistic proficiency, and partly on sociopolitical divides. The phrase ‘native speaker’ is partly a descriptor of linguistic profiles and partly ‘a personification of the safeguards of unity and continuity that are lodged at critical epistemic boundaries – the boundaries between languages to be exact’ (Chow, 2014: 58). The concept of ‘native speaker’ is often used, for example, to exclude individuals from former colonies from the teaching of English, as several scholars have noted (Canagarajah, 2012; Holliday, 2006). In my case, being a white man with","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47877305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172186
Alessandro Giammei
{"title":"(It)aliens on the fence","authors":"Alessandro Giammei","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172186","url":null,"abstract":"The philosophy of practice does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society but is rather the very theory of these contradictions.","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45699144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172782
Cristina Lombardi-Diop
{"title":"Postcolonial studies under erasure: The politics of the transnational in Italian studies","authors":"Cristina Lombardi-Diop","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172782","url":null,"abstract":"My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘ turns ’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant mobility. It is my contention that the discipline, in its institutional discourse and material practices has promoted their relevance unevenly","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43975956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172926
Annika Dahlman, Derek Duncan, Lauren Elliot, Mathilde Lyons, Cara O’Dwyer
{"title":"Transnational perspectives: Pedagogical practices","authors":"Annika Dahlman, Derek Duncan, Lauren Elliot, Mathilde Lyons, Cara O’Dwyer","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172926","url":null,"abstract":"What follows is a collective reflection by a tutor and students on the most recent version of a pedagogical project which has morphed and developed according to the rapid development of the disciplinary fields in which it is situated and the increasing availability and diversity of relevant primary texts and critical resources. ‘Black Italians’ is a onesemester long module offered to advanced students as an optional element in degree programmes in Italian at the University of St Andrews. It is one element of a four-year programme covering aspects of Italian culture from the Middle Ages to the present day, and its particular methodology and thematic focus builds on the mandatory study of authors such as Igiaba Scego and Primo Levi in the first two years of the programme. Devised and taught by Derek Duncan, the module is delivered in English in a series of seminars that investigate how ever malleable definitions of ‘Blackness’ have operated as powerful and flexible strategies of often violent erasure and exclusion at three defining historical moments for Italy from the late-19th century to the present day. Other modules at this level focus on cultures of diaspora, migration, and colonialism and interrogate similar, but not identical, histories and expressions of diversity. ‘Black Italians’ foregrounds race – its defining parameters and contested lived experience. The co-presence of these other modules explains some choices of emphasis and partial omission in the content of ‘Black Italians’ itself. For instance, detailed discussion of the Black Mediterranean, covered extensively in a parallel course, is less prominent than might be anticipated. The module has existed in different iterations for almost ten years. Earlier versions, for example, have included texts and films such as Wu Ming’s Timira, Kym Ragusa’s The Skin between Us, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Andrea Segre’s Sangue verde. The presence of Ragusa and Lee in the module points to the transnational optic of its methodological foundations and its many possible linkages and intersections. It purposefully resists the methodological nationalism in which study and research in Modern","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135541301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172783
John Gennari
{"title":"A stranger in the villaggio: Italian Studies, American Studies, jazz, and the transnational turn","authors":"John Gennari","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172783","url":null,"abstract":"I enter this conversation from an oblique angle, if not quite as a complete outsider. I do not work in the fi eld of Italian Studies. My Italian language skills are so embarrassingly feeble that I strategically avoid professional and social situations where they might be put to the test. (What little Italian I do speak, however, never fails to impress my siblings and cousins, second-and third-generation Italian Americans raised in families where Italian language was suppressed in the service of assimilation — a common story and yet one deserving deeper scholarly inquiry). Even as I have become fi rmly af fi liated with Italian American Studies — I serve on the editorial board of Italian American Review , have published there as well as in Italian Americana and Voices in Italian Americana , have served two terms on the Italian American Studies Association ’ s (IASA) Executive Council, and regularly attend the organization ’ s annual conference — this was not my fi eld of training and I continue to play catch-up with its history and its canonical texts. My coursework as a graduate student in American Studies, with a primary interest in jazz and African American culture, was bereft of anything related to Italian America or the larger Italian diaspora. If there was any possibility of independent study in this area, I would not have known — I simply had no scholarly interest. I literally did not know of the existence of Italian American studies until seven years after I fi nished my PhD. Despite these stunning disquali fi cations — or, actually, because of them — I embrace this invitation to re fl ect on the transnational turn in Italian Studies with an inkling that I might have something useful to say. That I have been afforded this opportunity notwith-standing my tenuous relationship to the fi eld may itself serve as evidence of at least one direction Transnational Italian Studies has taken and help us to see where it may be going. Academic","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48269961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Forum ItalicumPub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1177/00145858231172187
Liz Wren-Owens
{"title":"Transnational teaching practice and the curriculum","authors":"Liz Wren-Owens","doi":"10.1177/00145858231172187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231172187","url":null,"abstract":"In 2016 it was considered a radical change to propose a curriculum review which put the transnational at the centre of what we teach. Today, ‘transnational’ is a common descriptor in module titles across Modern Languages in the UK. The transnational has facilitated new approaches to the discipline that put migration, mobility, translation, and the legacies of empire at the heart of what we do. It has encouraged teachers and learners to think about the way that cultures and communities have been shaped by their interactions with others, and about the power dynamics inherent in these exchanges. At its best, the transnational is a powerful tool for interrogating not only what we learn and teach but also how we situate ourselves and how we create and disseminate knowledge. However, in practice it can be more complex to achieve these ideals, and embedding the transnational in teaching runs the risk of dilution and vagueness. My reflections in this article come from three interlinked perspectives: institutional, disciplinary, and as a citizen of a devolved nation. At institutional level, I led a curriculum review in the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University in the UK in 2016. As Director of Learning and Teaching, I spearheaded a wholesale re-thinking of every module in every language programme. One of the key goals was to embed transnational thinking and practices into compulsory ‘culture’ options in year 1 and 2, in line with the ethos of the ‘Transnationalising Modern Languages’ (TML) project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The second perspective comes from my experience of organising and attending symposia and workshops on transnationalising (and decolonising) the curriculum through work with the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML), the Institute for Modern Languages Research (IMLR), and the AHRC Creative Multilingualism project. The final perspective comes from my situated experience as a white Welsh academic working in a Welsh institution in a UK context. Many of the debates in the sector in the UK quite naturally focus on the English context, given the relative sizes of England and Wales. However the landscape in Wales, while informed by this broader UK framework, is also shaped by the different transnational and (de)colonial histories of Wales, and by the politics of the current devolved government. Compared to the UK government in Westminster, the Welsh government has a more","PeriodicalId":12355,"journal":{"name":"Forum Italicum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44461519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}