Contact Information
Annali d'Italianistica
CB 3170
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3170
Fax: (919) 962-5457
Upcoming Volumes
Vol. 28, AdI 2010: Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010
The twenty-eighth issue of Annali d’Italianistica, to be published in 2010, will devoted to the city of Rome from 1870 to the present day.
For the past century and a half, as for the rest of its long history, Rome has been both the product of the imagination and one of its more prolific and enduring agents; Rome is a material, geographical place, but it also occupies the space of cultural representation. “Rome was not built in a day,” it is commonly said; less frequently does one realize that Rome was, and continues to be, built with words, images, and sounds as much as with bricks, stone, and cement: no clear boundary may be drawn between the real and the imagined Rome, between the city of myth and the city on the map. Thus, the volume intends to investigate Rome’s presence since 1870 in texts, films, events, works of art and architecture, popular culture, and more.
The volume will be articulated chronologically into four parts: 1. Across Two Centuries; 2. Fascism and World War II; 3. The Postwar Period; 4. Into the Third Millennium.
1. Across two centuries. With the “Breach of Porta Pia,” Rome was freed from the political authority of the pope and, shortly thereafter, made the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Because it promised balance and mediation, in addition to its considerable historic weight, Rome was designated as the symbolic center of the young nation, through an active manipulation of both its urban outline and its less tangible urban culture: literature, politics, the arts, and those events that eventually formed the text of Rome’s history between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. All this was placed on top and in the interstices of a city already some twenty-five hundred years old, an urban palimpsest whose past never gets completely erased before the present is built to take its place.
2. Fascism and World War Two. Viewing Rome’s recent past as a decadent failure, Mussolini notoriously refashioned the capital so that it might better reflect his grandiose ideals of a new Italy; his approach was a mixture of reverence for Rome’s ancient past and ruthless desecration of its legacy. Artists, writers, and filmmakers have reflected on the novelties and the shortcomings of the regime’s myth of a monolithic capital, their critiques often veiled so as to avoid censorship—though the Duce’s demise and the traumas of the Second World War brought about copious and far more diverse representations of Rome in all available media.
3. The postwar period. The traces of its fascist experience rethought and rewritten (with the names of streets changed, the significance of monuments altered), Rome underwent further transformations during the second half of the twentieth century. But continuity prevailed over breaks with the past, and the city did not lose its long-standing significance as a place of mediation and circulation with respect to the rest of the country. Rome’s physical and allegorical contradictions, and its social and political role for the Italian peninsula as a whole, are expressed in the city’s art and architecture, literature and poetry, but also its cinema and its popular culture.
4. Into the third millennium: Along with the urban face-lifts inspired by the 2000 Jubilee and the cultural politics of Rome’s recent mayors, the late twentieth century and the new millennium have marked Rome with a multicultural stamp. From the immigrants inhabiting both center and periphery, and peopling contemporary films and books, to the visible presence of foreign architects and artists, to the building of the largest mosque in Europe, Rome’s provincial face is changing rapidly. Rome was chosen as the capital of united Italy because it signaled a mythical view of a nation unified in the past, while pointing to a unified future. One of the many questions contemporary Rome invites us to ponder, then, concerns the ways in which Rome’s 1870 promise of unity has been and is being fulfilled, betrayed, or, rather, whether such a view should be re-examined altogether.
For each section we welcome scholarly investigations on any aspect of the city of Rome from 1870 to 2010.
Essays are due to the editor by May 1st, 2009, with final versions due no later than December 1st, 2009. Essays must be in English, not exceed 25 double-spaced pages, and conform to the MLA style; they need to be submitted electronically, using Microsoft Word, and should include a list of works cited. Interested scholars are invited to contact the volume’s editor as soon as possible.
For further information or to submit an essay, please contact Guest Editor Cristina Mazzoni, Dept. of Romance Languages, University of Vermont.
AdI 2011: Italian Critical Theory
Essays are sought for a special issue of Annali d’Italianistica 29 (2011): Italian Critical Theory
Twenty-one years ago, the publication of Giovanna Borradori’s anthology Recoding Metaphysics (1988) and of Gianni Vattimo’s The End of Modernity (1988) signaled that the post-war generation of Italian philosophers was ready to join the theoretical debate that was going on in the English-speaking world. The translation of other works by Vattimo generated an interest that went way beyond the boundaries of Italian Studies. A few years later, the English publication of Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community (1993), immediately followed by other volumes, made the Italian philosopher a household name in comparative literature departments and continental philosophy programs. The philosophical geography of the North-American universities was indeed opening up to new territories. The appearance of Carlo Sini’s Images of Truth (1993), Massimo Cacciari’s Necessary Angel (1994), Mario Perniola’s Enigmas (1995), Adriana Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato (1995), Antonio Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx (1996) — not to mention the books of the same authors that came after, culminating in the best-selling status of Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire, 2001 — made clear that contemporary Italian philosophy was now a strong presence in the post-modern theoretical landscape of the American and British universities. Recently, Brian Schroeder’s and Silvia Benso’s anthology Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2007) has charted an exceptionally varied land, whose richness is second to none in terms of theoretical ambition and hermeneutical subtlety.
Seeking to situate itself within this theoretical context, the 2011 AdI volume intends to address the relevance of Italian critical theory today. It will be divided in two parts. The first section will include invited papers only. Some of the most prominent Italian philosophers have been invited to contribute and they have all accepted the invitation. The second section will be open to the contributions of scholars who wish to engage in this theoretical debate and will answer this call for papers. As a mere suggestion, submissions may be organized around keywords such as aesthetics, bioethics, biopolitics, cognitive approaches, deconstructionism, difference and identity, existentialism and phenomenology, feminism, geopolitics, genealogy, gender, GLBTQ studies, elites and multitudes, Europe and Empire, grammatology, hermeneutics, humanism and anti-humanism, Idealism and its legacy, metaphysics and its destiny, Marxism and post-Marxism, modernity and post-modernity, North/South dichotomy, otherness and sameness, philosophy and religion, political theology, traveling theories, semiotics, style and the philosophical discourse. In additional to the theorists who have already been mentioned, Annali d’Italianistica will welcome papers on other relevant figures of the Italian thought in the last sixty years. As Annali d’Italianistica intends to make Italian critical theory available to the English-speaking world, all contributions will be in English.
Deadline for submission is September 30, 2010; publication is expected by fall 2011. All contributions will be refereed. Essays, not to exceed twenty-five double-spaced pages and written in English, should conform to the MLA style, as set forth by Annali d’Italianistica (http://www.ibiblio.org/annali/norms.html).
Prospective contributors should address all inquiries to Alessandro Carrera, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun Road, Houston, TX 77204-3006. E-mail: <acarrera@uh.edu>.