Published in two volumes between 1868 and 1869, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott follows the classic coming-of-age structure for female characters as developed in nineteenth-century literature. Although the story is first introduced as that of a family, it instead follows each protagonist on their individual journey towards social recognition, which, for the young March sisters, is gained with marriage. From this perspective, girlhood is a transient stage of life, routed towards the achievement of economic (and emotional) stability.Since its first publication, Alcott's classic has been widely discussed and subjected to many reinterpretations in literary form, as well as in film and theatrical dramatisation. In this article I focus on the novel Bagna i fiori e aspettami (1986), a rewriting by the Italian author Lidia Ravera composed in the aftermath of the feminist struggles of the seventies. The novel, set in Italy during the eighties, offers the opportunity for the author to integrate the representation of girlhood with the language and images of mass culture. As Carol Lazzaro-Weiss points out in her study on the female Bildungsroman (1993), «women writers are creating new themes and plots and […] they do so by recombining, challenging, and exploiting old structures to their purposes» (18). Bagna i fiori e aspettami offers a good example for studying such literary manipulation. This essay shows how Ravera's main character anticipates a new idea of femininity which – leaving behind political instances and reflections on gender essentialism – embraces a more individualistic and certainly more problematic approach to female agency influenced by postfeminist discourse (GREER 1999; HOOKS 2000; GAMBLE 2001). ; Published in two volumes between 1868 and 1869, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott follows the classic coming-of-age structure for female characters as developed in nineteenth-century literature. Although the story is first introduced as that of a family, it instead follows each protagonist on their individual ...
The article analyzes the developments of the alternative editorial circuit promoted by the artistic-literary avant-gardes and counter-cultural movements in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, with specific reference to the production of literary texts. The organization of the production system and the intent of the producers are taken into particular consideration, identifying the cultural objectives defined within a strategy of social and political opposition. The characteristics of the literature born in the countercultural field are also studied in depth. ; Nell'articolo vengono analizzati gli sviluppi del circuito editoriale alternativo promosso dalle avanguardie artistico-letterarie e dai movimenti controculturali in Italia negli anni '60 e '70, con specifico riferimento alla produzione di testi letterari. Vengono presi in particolare considerazione l'organizzazione del sistema di produzione e l'intento dei soggetti produttori, identificando gli obiettivi culturali stabiliti nell'ambito di una strategia di opposizione sociale e politica. Vengono inoltre approfondite le caratteristiche della letteratura nata in ambito controculturale.
La tesi è stata intitolata "Change the System From Within". La participatory democracy e le riforme istituzionali negli Stati Uniti degli anni Sessanta e si compone di cinque capitoli. Nel primo capitolo si riprende l'idea di participatory democracy emersa in seno alla New Left e ai movimenti sociali dei lunghi anni Sessanta. In questo contesto il concetto di participatory democracy assunse due principali accezioni: da una parte rappresentava la rivendicazione politica di un maggior coinvolgimento attivo della cittadinanza nelle politiche - locali, statali e federali - frutto della crisi di legittimità che la democrazia americana stava attraversando in quegli anni; dall'altra, il concetto venne adottato come principio organizzativo all'interno dei gruppi stessi di attivisti, con la funzione di prefigurare quelle riforme politico-istituzionali cui gli stessi militanti aspiravano. Dalla stessa temperie di contestazione sorse del resto anche la critica che alcuni studiosi mossero alla teoria liberale pluralista e alla sua esemplificazione nella coeva democrazia americana. Nel primo capitolo si mostra proprio come da quelle rielaborazioni critiche degli anni Sessanta emerse anche il primo modello di participatory democracy in seno alla teoria politica, sviluppato pienamente negli anni Settanta e Ottanta da Carole Pateman, Crawford B. Macpherson e Benjamin Barber. Questa parte del lavoro di tesi si propone quindi di accostare alle pratiche partecipative introdotte dai movimenti anche la ricostruzione dello sviluppo graduale di una teoria politica della participatory democracy. Tale riflessione è completata da un'analisi storica di ampio raggio, necessaria a meglio contestualizzare il fenomeno e ad includere le nuove richieste democratiche nell'ambito di una tradizione democratico-rappresentativa già dotata di istituti partecipativi di democrazia diretta. Chiarito il quadro storico-politico degli anni Sessanta, il secondo capitolo analizza la ricezione dell'idea di participatory democracy nelle politiche federali. A questo proposito si illustra come il principio di citizen participation fosse stato recepito già con la War on Poverty promossa da Lindon B. Johnson alla metà degli anni Sessanta e fu mantenuto, con esiti istituzionali differenti, almeno fino alla fine della presidenza Carter. Si dimostra inoltre che, malgrado il dettato legislativo federale fosse spesso approssimativo sulle modalità operative, quel principio ebbe in realtà un notevole impatto sulle relazioni intergovernative. Tale principio favorì ad esempio l'intraprendenza di molti amministratori locali nel promuovere il decentramento amministrativo e politico su base di quartiere. Nel terzo capitolo l'analisi affronta le principali trasformazioni in senso partecipativo avvenute nei sistemi di governo statali e locali negli anni Settanta, mettendole in relazione anche alle dinamiche intergovernative di più lungo periodo. Il capitolo è strutturato in modo tale da evidenziare il tendenziale recupero e rafforzamento di istituti già esistenti, come l'initiative, i public hearing e gli school district come strumenti di rivendicazione del community control in alcune città di grandi dimensioni. Mentre il secondo e terzo capitolo tendono a osservare le riforme istituzionali degli anni Settanta in senso partecipativo in seno al governo federale, statale e locale, i due successivi capitoli mirano ad osservare l'impatto della participatory democracy nel confronto tra attivismo militante e pratiche amministrative tradizionali degli anni Settanta. Il quarto capitolo è infatti dedicato all'ingresso della nuova generazione di politici progressisti nelle amministrazioni locali e statali fra la fine degli anni Sessanta e la prima metà degli anni Settanta. Per analizzarlo si è deciso di analizzare come principale caso di studio la Conference on Alternative State and Local Policy (CASLP), una organizzazione e forum nazionale che mirava proprio ad unire alle istanze dei progressisti una expertise di governo. Nell'ambito della CASLP, la cosiddetta Coalizione progressista di Berkeley, CA, fornì un caso esemplare di strategia di confronto con le istituzioni locali e per questo il capitolo le dedica una attenta disanima. La pluriennale esperienza di azione collettiva dei progressisti di Berkeley nell'arena istituzionale è infatti rilevante sia per l'innovazione nella strategia istituzionale, sia per attestare una evoluzione dell'idea di participatory democracy nel tempo. Il quinto capitolo ricostruisce ed analizza la carriera politica di Tom Hayden negli anni in cui passò dall'attivismo alla politica istituzionale, con la campagna elettorale per diventare Senatore della California in Congresso (1975-1976) e la successiva Campaign for Economic Democracy (1976-1982), confermando la spiccata propensione del leader all'innovazione istituzionale in senso partecipativo. In particolare, nella campagna elettorale per il Senato del Congresso del 1976 Hayden riuscì a implementare forme di decision-making partecipato in seno allo staff. Nella gestione del personale cercò inoltre di favorire l'empowerment di volontari e cittadini senza perdere di vista i requisiti essenziali per la sopravvivenza della campagna: fundraising e propaganda. In linea con la sua battaglia contro le distorsioni economiche del big business, scelse di non accettare fondi da corporation e banche e riuscì nell'intento di essere sostenuto per gran parte da small donors. Hayden dunque introdusse pratiche di participatory democracy in seno alla campagna elettorale e continuò a rivendicare la sua fiducia nella forza dei movimenti grass-roots. L'analisi storica, ad ogni modo, evidenzia anche le criticità che derivavano dall'uso di pratiche partecipative nella governance della campagna elettorale. Atttraverso l'analisi teorica e politico-istituzionale della democrazia partecipativa americana fra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta su vari livelli istituzionali (federale, statale e locale), questo progetto di ricerca tenta quindi di colmare un vuoto storiografico e, al tempo stesso intende contribuire alla definizione storico-istituzionale della participatory democracy in seno alla democrazia rappresentativa degli Stati Uniti. Infine, la presente ricerca mira a inserirsi nel dibattito pubblico contemporaneo sulla participatory democracy, offrendo una visione storico-istituzionale importante per meglio comprendere il fenomeno e che, finora, non ha ricevuto l'attenzione che meriterebbe. ; Chapter 1 retrieves the idea of participatory democracy stemmed from the Long 1960s New Left and the following social movements. Indeed, the concept of participatory democracy mainly acquired two slightly different shapes in that historical framework. From one hand, it meant the broad political call for common citizens' greater involvement in the policy-making - at the local, state and federal level. That request was in fact a reply to the ongoing crisis of the American democracy, in terms of political legitimacy and social representation of minorities and poor people. In the other hand, participatory democracy represented the organizing principle adopted by most of the grass-roots groups of that period, with a clear prefigurative function. Indeed, making the activist groups' inner decision-making participatory was a way for the collectives to anticipate the institutional changes they aspired to. In the meantime, because of the same disaffection against the raising social and political inequalities, some political science scholars elaborated a critique to the pluralist version of the liberal democracy - then the most praised one, as well as credited as it was embodied in the American democracy. Those 1960s critiques were eventually used to conceive the first political theory of participatory democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, as Chapter 1 shows. The participatory democracy's canon was in fact mostly developed by Carole Pateman, Crawford B. Macpherson and Benjamin Barber. Beside the intellectual history of participatory democracy from 1960s to 1980s, Chapter 1 allows to contextualize ideas and practices of common citizens' participation into the wider history of the American Political Development. According to that, chapter 1 also provides a detailed analysis of the participatory political institutions that were traditionally part of the United States representative democracy. Chapter 2 verifies whether the 1960s idea of participatory democracy actually affected the federal public policies of the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed the principle of "citizen participation" was introduced in some of the War on Poverty legislations, promoted by Lyndon B. Johnson since the mid-1960s. Although the heterogeneous institutional effects, that principle was maintained in some grant-in-aid projects until the end of the Carter administration, through the Nixon and Ford administrations. Therefore, the political meanings assumed by the idea of "citizen participation" and its institutional consequences from 1964 to 1980 are carefully analyzed in chapter 2. Moreover, chapter 2 shows that the principle of citizen participation had such a strong impact on the intergovernmental relations. It thus brought forward, for instance, the local public officers' entrepreneurship towards the local devolution, shifting the administrative and political power base from the center to the neighborhood. Chapter 3 deals with the 1970s main institutional reforms aimed at introducing the common citizens' participation in the government decision-making at the state and local levels. Those reforms are deeply related to some long-lasting intergovernmental dynamics and this relationship is also argued. The same chapter's lay-out is vowed to underline the 1970s general trend of retrieval and enhancing of traditional institutions, such as the initiative (direct democracy), the public hearings and the school districts. The school board was indeed reevaluated and reshaped as a means of community control in the biggest cities. As chapters 2 and 3 aim at exploring the implementation of participatory reforms in the federal, state and local level of government, chapters 4 and 5 aim at inquiring the participatory democracy's impact on the 1970s boundary of polity - the space where activism meets political institutions. Chapter 4 inquires the new generations of progressive politicians entering the local and state administrations from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. To frame that national phenomenon, the historical analysis use the Conference of Alternative States and Local Policies (CASLP) as a case study. CASLP was indeed a national organization born in 1975 to give voice to the progressive public officers around the country and allowed them sharing their government experiences for a more effective institutional impact. Inside CASLP, the progressive coalition of Berkeley, CA (called Berkeley Citizens' Action, BCA) was especially spotted for its exemplary strategy to confront local political institutions. The 1970s BCA's political actions are thus specifically analyzed. In fact, the institutional approach of the Berkeley progressive coalition resulted to be innovative in terms of strategy as well as successful in introducing new forms of participatory democracy into the local government, assessing the 1970s evolution of the participatory democracy political theory and practices. Chapter 5 retraces the political career of the former New Left leader Tom Hayden during the years of turning from activism to institutional politics. Especially, the analysis focuses on the 1975-1976 U.S. Senate Campaign and the following Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), a coalition project and organization led by Hayden with the goal of mobilizing activists and public officers around the issues of economic justice, environmental and economic public policies (1976-1982). That period - just before Hayden was elected representative at the California Legislature in 1982 - is thus analyzed as a testing ground to verify his long-lasting commitment towards participatory democracy. The historical and political analysis, based on original archival findings, confirms Hayden's inclination for institutional innovation in the participatory realm. In particular, during the 1975-1976 electoral campaign for the U.S. Senate in California Hayden introduced participatory forms of decision-making involving staff people, volunteers and supporting grass-roots groups. Moreover, that campaign's staff and people management was conceived in order to directly empower citizens and volunteers, without losing track of the campaigning basic requirements (e. g. fundraising and propaganda). As he stood against big business and economic inequalities, he chose to reject fundings from corporations and banks. Therefore his electoral campaign was mostly sustained by small donors. Hayden successfully made the campaigning more open, accountable and participatory and kept on sponsoring his trust in community organizing and grass-roots social movements even in his following political endeavour, CED. Eventually, the investigation casts lights on the strengths, as well as the critical issues, produced by the Hayden's participatory governance of campaigning. By the means of analysing the intellectual history and the institutional implementation of participatory democracy during late 1960s-1970s United States, this research project firstly aims at making up the lack of historiography about the topic. In the second stance, grounding the institutional and political history of participatory democracy in the United States representative democracy - where the concept was born - this research project intends to provide a first genealogy of the participatory democracy's institutional implementation. In this sense, the research projects wants also to contribute to the contemporary debate on the participatory democracy. It is indeed a compelling and popular issue in many worldwide political arenas, but it is still rarely defined by its historical and institutional terms.
The term "comprehensive security (sōgō anzen hoshō 総合安全保障)" was first created in Japan after the early 1970s international crises (oil, food, monetary and diplomatic). The new concept widened the traditional scope of the concept of "security", embracing those economic aspects, such as the scarcity of raw materials, that were considered capable of threatening national security. Food security was a central element of the comprehensive security strategy. Since the early postwar years, Japan was heavily dependent on food imports from the United States. The food crisis of the 1970s with the consequent American embargo on soybeans revealed Japan's vulnerability to interruptions in food supplies and raised questions about the US as a reliable supplier. The present work provides a critical analysis of the development of the concept of "food security" in Japan, within the broader debate on comprehensive security in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, through the analysis of political and academic documents, the article investigates the impact of the American soybean embargo on this debate, in order to understand how "food dependence" began to be perceived as a threat to national security and how this perception influenced not only Japan's food policies but also its international relations. ; The term "comprehensive security (sōgō anzen hoshō 総合安全保障)" was first created in Japan after the early 1970s international crises (oil, food, monetary and diplomatic). The new concept widened the traditional scope of the concept of "security", embracing those economic aspects, such as the scarcity of raw materials, that were considered capable of threatening national security. Food security was a central element of the comprehensive security strategy. Since the early postwar years, Japan was heavily dependent on food imports from the United States. The food crisis of the 1970s with the consequent American embargo on soybeans revealed Japan's vulnerability to interruptions in food supplies and raised questions about the US as a reliable supplier. The present work provides a critical analysis of the development of the concept of "food security" in Japan, within the broader debate on comprehensive security in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, through the analysis of political and academic documents, the article investigates the impact of the American soybean embargo on this debate, in order to understand how "food dependence" began to be perceived as a threat to national security and how this perception influenced not only Japan's food policies but also its international relations.
L'idea intramontabile di una «grande Bologna» informa, negli «boom» economico, l'azione politico-amministrativa che fa del capoluogo il fulcro di una regione economica forgiata attorno all'espansione delle industrie. Con l'intento di studiare i risvolti socio-culturali dell'industrializzazione dell'area negli anni Sessanta e Settanta, la ricerca tenta di intrecciare tre piani distinti di analisi: a) il processo di trasformazione socio-economica nei due decenni, nel tentativo di coglierne i caratteri di fondo – economici, dimensionali, territoriali – e le connessioni extra-locali; b) il ruolo che il Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), in quanto attore egemone locale, ha assunto nel mettere a punto una strategia di governo dello sviluppo, evidenziandone i rapporti con altri attori locali (Camera di Commercio e Confederazione Nazionale dell'Artigianato, CNA) e la complessa dialettica fra centro e periferia dello stesso; c) la ricostruzione di specifiche traiettorie soggettive e individuali come analisi capace di restituire complessità prospettica a una storia che, altrimenti, rischia di rimanere schiacciata su un quadro interpretativo consolidato che ha teso a rintracciare molto più spesso le continuità e la coerenza interna al sistema, piuttosto che le eventuali aporie e le fratture storicamente date. A fronte di un lettura consolidata, la ricerca critica così la categoria di «modello emiliano» come formula che ha assolto a una precisa funzione ideologica e continua ad essere influente anche nella più recente storiografia. Tramite una griglia con al centro tre nodi di discussione – identità professionale, appartenenza politico-culturale, desiderio di autonomia – la ricerca mira, inoltre, a ridefinire una 'cultura del lavoro autonomo' in maniera non ontologica, ma come tentativo di mettere in luce aporie e contraddizioni che entrano in relazione problematica con i tratti culturali che la narrazione prevalente attribuisce alla piccola imprenditoria della Terza Italia. ; The everlasting idea of a «great Bologna» shapes, during the «economic miracle» years, local political and administrative action that put the city at the midst of a economic region made by industrial expansion. With the aim of studying socio-political implications of industrialization during the 1960s and 1970s, this research's aim is to weave three separate level of analysis: a) the process of socio-economic transformation during those decades with the purpose of understanding the general features – in terms of economics, dimensional, spatial – within it extra-local connections; b) the role played by the Italian Communist Party (PCI), as local hegemonic actor, while developing a specific territorial political economy, seen in respect to other local actors (Chamber of Commerce and National Artisans' Federation, CNA) and in the complex dialectics between party's center versus Emilian periphery; c) the study of specific trajectories of subjective and individual patterns as a way to give complex historical perspective otherwise collapsed within a well established narrative usually concerned in emphasizing continuity and inner coherence instead of crafting a specific place for aporias and historical cleavages. Against this established narrative , the research criticize the category of «Emilian model» as a precise ideological formula which continues to have strong influence in present time. Furthermore, by using a framework shaped into three different topics – professional identity, cultural-political belonging, autonomy research –, the dissertation aims at redefine a non-ontological 'labor culture of self-employment' as an attempt of shed lights on aporias and contradictions within its problematic relationship with Third Italy's narrative of small entrepreneurship.
AbstractThe review article reconstructs the reception of Gramsci's writings in Italy from the postwar-period to the present. Compared to the Italian debate that has given little attention to Gramsci's writings, except for in some periods such as the 1970s, Gramsci's fortune has continued to grow internationally. Recent Italian contributions, such as the book of Alberto Bugio, Grasmci storico, criticised in this review, remain indebted to an historicist approach that does not allow a use of Gramscian categories as an optic for interpreting and enacting the transformation of the present. The analysis concentrates on concepts such as 'passive revolution', 'fascism', 'Taylorism' and 'bureaucracy'.
The early part of the essay focuses on the dramatic change in the critical status of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a major point of reference for feminist criticism through the 1970s and 1980s, who later became the target of accusations of racism in the 1990s. The author first traces the influence of second-wave and third-wave feminism on Gilman studies, and then looks at the ideological and rhetorical common ground shared by certain postures of revisionist criticism in the 1990s along with the culture of political correctness, with special reference to John L. Jackson's notion of "de cardio racism". ; 1 ; open ; Non definito ; open ; De Biasio, Anna ; De Biasio, Anna
The author reconstructs the debate that developed in the 1980s in the Etuc in which Trentin was committed to the construction of a European social model. The essay analyzes the difficulties, contradictions and novelties of the trade union proposal in response to the interconnected effects of inflation, oil crises and mass unemployment in the 1970s, starting with the "Keynes-plus" approach, which proposed new investments for the improvement of working conditions, protection of natural and social environment, and for an equitable distribution of growth and the reduction of consumption of scarce resources, especially energy. Within this framework Trentin stressed the importance of a renewal of the Union's task in post-Fordism in which the European dimension and its ability to affect the process of integration become central.
The article overviews the main turning points in Italian history according to some recent scholarly works and it the multiple perspectives and conflicting memories marking the very origins of the politically unified peninsula. Matching individual memoirs and perceptions of epochal changes with official institutional dating, "classical" break dates from Liberal and Fascist Ages -- such as 1870, 1915, 1940, 1943 -- are taken into account, as well as the crucial chronology in the building of Republican Italy. Social-economic revolutions as the one of the 1960s and the dramatic events belonging to the 1970s are considered. A structural trend based on long transitions and patterns of public commemoration initiatives and narratives are briefly outlined. Adapted from the source document.
Themes and events of decolonization in Italian visual poetry. The article explores the presence of anticolonial struggles and new forms of colonialism in Italian visual poetry between the 1960s and the 1970s. An analysis of works by Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Eugenio Miccini, Luciano Ori and Adriano Spatola reveals not only the pervasive presence of the Vietnam War – during which the United States became a real emblem of imperialism – but also a more articulated geography of the struggles for liberation, both in Africa and in Latin America. Visual poets, in fact, were able to combine research on expressive languages with ideological commitment: the deconstruction of the codes of commercial and mass communication leads to political criticism, even internationally. Guerrilla is not only a linguistic approach: it has also evident political content, with strong internationalist significance.
The Author briefly summaries the legislative history of Italian social security cover for extra-occupational tuberculosis, and lists the economic benefits that the National Institute of Social Security (INPS) reserves for the individuals who are insured with it and suffer from this disease, describing both the administrative and health requirements. Thus, the publication attempts to place the purely conceptual medical-legal aspects on which social security for extra-occupational tuberculosis is based under the microscope of rational criticism; in this way, the medical and legal foundations for the prevalence of morbidity are examined, to reveal the anachronistic principles of a protection that, with current changes in social, geopolitical and labour dynamics, remains based on laws from the 1930s and 1970s, and the principles they expressed.
This paper aims to analyse the presence of figures and themes coming from the Classical heritage in the Japanese manga production. This review focuses mainly on how the manga-artists use such characters in order to identify and depict otherness: the works that are taken under consideration are mainly comics dating to 1970s, in which it is possible to follow an evolution of this production. The Author tries also to present a social and political explication of this phenomenon, based upon a brief analysis of how these theme could be connected to the evolution of the cultural and military relationship between Japan and the West ypical way while the latter are strongly reinterpreted. So the purpose of this paper is to understand the reasons for this different use of the past.
C.B. Macpherson developed the concepts of «possessive individualism» and «transfer of powers» in his highly influential work on seventeenth-century English political thought, wherein he found core elements of doctrines of property that exerted a lasting influence over the global liberal order. Antonio Gramsci devoted many pages in his Prison Notebooks to the contradictions inherent in that order, which if combined in a given conjuncture, might constitute its «organic crisis», in which capitalism's consistent contradictions are qualitatively transformed by new elements so that the entire system itself is placed in question. Covid-19 can be represented as an organic crisis of the global neoliberal order which, since the 1970s, has made possessive individualism a veritable secular religion: it presages, although it does not itself inaugurate, a systemic challenge to bourgeois civilization. Macpherson; Possessive Individualism; Gramsci; Organic Crisis; Covid-19.
International audience ; During the 1970s thousands of Argentinians fled their country due to harsh state repression targeting any kind of political dissidence. Italy has been a main recipient of these refugees, yet the Italian government has never legally recognized their condition as such. However, despite the lack of wel-coming policies, large sections of the Italian population mobilized to support the Argentinean exiled, building significant solidarity networks. ; Negli anni Settanta migliaia di argentini lasciarono il proprio paese per scappare dalla feroce repressione statale. L'Italia fu uno dei paesi che accolse questi esuli, anche se il governo italiano non riconobbe mai legalmente la loro condizione di esiliati. In assenza di politiche di accoglienza promosse dallo Stato, la popolazione si mobilitò per aiutare queste persone, dando vita a importanti reti di solidarietà.
