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In this article the author explores the cultural movement called Afrofuturism, tracing its origins, features, simbology, and its historical and political meanings. Starting from the (supposed) discoursive gap between African and African American people on one side and technology and science fiction on the other, this paradigm addresses themes related to the intersection of African Diaspora and African cultures with technology and science fiction, with the aim to recover the history of slavery and racism through the projections into alternative space-time contexts. In particular, the author explores the feminist afrofuturism perspective in order to examine the specific oppression and cultural production of African and African American women. In doing so, the author analyzes the development of afrofuturism in Italy, focusing on the work of the singer and beatmaker Karima 2G.

A gripping essay on the role that Italian intellectuals played in the organization and scheduling of Swiss public radio between the Fascist period and the so-called Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead). The book What was the role of Italian intellectuals in the history of Swiss radio broadcasting culture? And what images of Switzerland and Italy were conveyed between 1930 and 1980? Ever since it began in the 1930s, Italian-language Swiss radio, a national public service broadcaster addressed to a linguistic minority, drew from intellectual resources external to its own political borders, a characteristic that contributed to defining its profile. During the Fascist period, for example, Italian intellectuals could express themselves from the microphones of this radio with a freedom that they were not allowed in their home country: Benedetto Croce's 1936 speech is a memorable case in point. Subse-quently, when the interview and debate formats tended to undermine that of the radio lecture, journalists and writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Eugenio Montale took advantage of the debating space that Swiss Italy offered them. By analysing the written and audio sources, many of which unpublished, Nelly Valsangiacomo's essay reconstructs a complex as well as fascinating radio broadcasting panorama, brought to life by the voices of some of the greatest Italian intellectuals, such as Elio Vittorini, Maria Corti, Indro Montanelli, and Dario Fo. Voices that can now be listened to once again thanks to a web page completing the book: www.rsi.ch/dietroalmicrofono (Radiotelevisione svizzera di lingua italiana/Italian-language Swiss Radio and Television)

Based on an ethnographic survey, the essay analyses a case of "return" from the Atlantic slave trade diaspora to the Ghanaian town of Prince's Town. This dynamic involved three different actors: the African American returnees, the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations and the local authority divided by a strong chieftaincy dispute. All actors located themselves within different frames of references and had different expectations about this return, but all welcomed it and employed the rhetoric of common ancestral origins in order to validate it. This enlightens a dynamic process of construction of belongings, and illustrates the particular role of the local authorities confirming how chiaftaincy is a fundamental and active political actor in contemporary Ghana. Adapted from the source document.

Questa tesi intende offrire un'analisi del pensiero del sociologo afroamericano E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) in prospettiva storica. La ricerca si propone di tenere conto principalmente di tre elementi. In primo luogo, del ruolo svolto da Frazier in qualità di sociologo inserito nel dibattito accademico statunitense. In secondo luogo, del suo attivismo politico come intellettuale afroamericano impegnato contro la discriminazione razziale e per la costruzione di un'alleanza di classe interrazziale. Infine, della sua partecipazione al dibattito transnazionale sulla decolonizzazione e del suo legame con i movimenti anticoloniali. Tramite l'analisi di questi tre aspetti, la tesi si propone di esaminare il contributo politico e accademico di Frazier, di evidenziare i confini dei dibattiti a cui egli prese parte, nonché la peculiare posizione ricoperta dalla generazione di black sociologists ― nati alla fine dell'Ottocento e perlopiù deceduti prima della metà degli anni Sessanta ― di cui Frazier faceva parte. ; This research examines African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier's thought, in a historical perspective (1894-1962). This thesis focuses on three aspects. Firstly, it takes into account Frazier's role as a sociologist, within the American academic context. Secondly, it analyzes Frazier's political activism, as an African-American intellectual who fought against racial discrimination, and for the construction of an interracial class alliance. Lastly, this research focuses on Frazier's contribution to the transnational debate on decolonization, and on his ties to the anti-colonial movement. By connecting these aspects of Frazier's life, this thesis's purpose is to highlight the boundaries of these three spheres of public debate. The research also examines Frazier's peculiar position, as part of a first generation of black professional sociologists, who were born at the end of the Nineteenth century and died in the mid-1960s.

Il portentoso successo ottenuto dai Beatles negli U.S.A. aprì il mercato americano a molte band della scena musicale britannica. Qualsiasi cosa avesse un sapore "british" divenne immediatamente interessante agli occhi del pubblico americano. Questo fenomeno noto come "British Invasion" costituisce il contesto entro il quale si muove la ricerca in oggetto: descrivere in che modo e per quali ragioni il blues venne riscoperto e reinterpretato da musicisti bianchi, quali conseguenze ciò abbia avuto nel ridefinire i canoni del genere, e quale sia stato il contributo specifico del blues revival inglese. Nel primo capitolo viene descritta la diffusione del jazz in Gran Bretagna a partire dalla fine degli anni '10 del XX secolo. Il Jazz in Inghilterra, nonostante sia stato osteggiato dalle componenti più conservatrici della società britannica, poco supportato dai media istituzionali come la BBC, ed intralciato dagli effetti della crisi economica degli anni '30, ha potuto radicarsi e diffondersi in Gran Bretagna grazie alle capacità organizzative messe in campo dai seguaci del jazz che furono in grado di crearsi un proprio spazio e un proprio mercato di riferimento attraverso la fondazione di associazioni come i Rhythm Club, riviste, negozi specializzati, piccole etichette indipendenti e perfino band musicali. Tra gli anni '30 e '40 il dibattito tra i modernisti sostenitori del be-pop e i tradizionalisti sostenitori dell'hot jazz degli anni '20 favorì la nascita di un interesse specifico per il blues. Per meglio definire a quale stile di jazz assegnare la palma dell'autenticità molti appassionati di jazz si volsero ad approfondire la conoscenza e lo studio della musica afroamericana nel suo complesso e in particolare del blues visto come un precursore del jazz. Il blues revival, quindi, fu un movimento che prese le mosse dall'ambito del jazz inglese per poi svilupparsi autonomamente. Nella seconda parte del capitolo (3 e 4 paragrafo) si è cercato di mettere in evidenza le continuità e le discontinuità esistenti tra il mondo del jazz e del blues in Inghilterra. I seguaci del blues, infatti, si trovarono a dover affrontare problematiche molto simili a quelle dei loro predecessori del jazz come ad esempio la scarsità di materiale discografico e dettero risposte organizzative similari. In particolare il mondo del blues revival ereditò da quello del jazz un approccio alla musica serio e compito alimentato da un forte elemento ideologico incentrato sul concetto di autenticità musicale. Il secondo capitolo descrive l'influenza che ebbe la diffusione delle popular music americana sui teenager inglesi degli anni '50 e come ciò abbia portato molti giovani britannici a conoscere il blues e a praticarlo assieme ad un vasto ventaglio di stili e generi della musica popolare americana ponendo così le basi per quella originale rielaborazione della musica americana che costituì uno dei punti di forza della British Invasion. Ampio spazio è dedicato a collocare la diffusione di generi musicali come il rock 'n' roll e lo skiffle nella cornice dei profondi cambiamenti economici, sociali, e di costume che caratterizzarono l'Inghilterra del dopoguerra e come questi impattarono sulle culture giovanili. Il terzo capitolo si occupa di delineare la crescita del movimento di blues revival inglese nei primi anni '60 seguendo la fondazione e i primi passi di alcune band storiche del blues-rock britannico. L'accento è posto sul rapporto pedagogico che si era venuto a creare tra gli artisti americani che andavano ad esibirsi in Inghilterra e i giovani musicisti britannici che li accompagnavano durante i tour. Una sezione importante del capitolo si sforza di mettere in evidenza i rapporti tra il mondo del folk revival britannico e la prima fase prettamente acustica del blues revival inglese e come la svolta elettrica del blues britannico, ispirata dai rappresentati del Chicago Blues come Muddy Waters, e portata avanti da pionieri come Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, Chris Barber abbia favorito un distacco precoce del il blues britannico da una visione purista del blues di derivazione folk che vedeva prevalentemente, se non unicamente, nel blues acustico l'unico vero ed autentico blues. Il quarto capitolo sposta la sua attenzione sugli Stati Uniti d'America e cerca di evidenziare alcune essenziali differenze e punti d'incontro tra il blues revival americano e quello britannico a partire dal ruolo del rock 'n' roll che in America fu più un ostacolo che un elemento di promozione del blues presso i giovani bianchi. Il blues revival in America rimase più a lungo legato al mondo del folk revival che aveva sviluppato una concezione estremamente purista del blues legandolo ad un canone acustico e rurale. Il legame più stretto del blues revival americano con l'ambiente del folk dipese da vari fattori ambientali e politici. La scoperta del blues da parte dei bianchi in America avvenne, molto più che in Inghilterra, attraverso l'opera di folcloristi e intellettuali delle controculture che vedevano nella musica elettrica un espediente usato dall'industria musicale per creare musica artificiale ed inautentica. Inoltre, la musica folk, che godette di un rinnovata popolarità tra la fine degli anni '50 e i primi anni '60, divenne la colonna sonora di tutti quei movimenti di protesta neri e bianchi che, soprattutto nei primi anni '60, erano favorevoli ad una soluzione integrazionista del problema razziale americano e vedevano quindi positivamente la promozione della cultura afroamericana. Il Newport Folk Festival fu l'evento che alimentò maggiormente questa visione folclorica del blues che tuttavia nascondeva un approccio colonialista alla cultura afroamericana da parte dei bianchi che pur la promuovevano. Proprio al Newport Folk Festival, in occasione dell'esibizione di Bob Dylan del 1965, emerse in piena luce lo scontro tra la visione purista del blues propria del canone folk e la visione modernista incarnata dalla Paul Butterfield Blues band, nella quale suonavano dei ragazzi bianchi di Chicago che avevano oltrepassato i confini razziali della società americana ed erano andati nei quartieri afroamericani per imparare il blues dai maestri del genere. L'incidente di Newport rese famosa la Paul Butterfield blues band e dette un forte impulso allo stile elettrico del blues bianco, ma fu principalmente in Inghilterra che il blues elettrico venne consacrato come uno stile di blues autentico e fondativo dei generi moderni come il Rhythm & Blues,il Rock 'N' Roll e la nascente musica rock. La maggiore libertà espressiva che visse la stagione matura del blues revival in Inghilterra dovuta ad una minore interdipendenza con il mondo del folk e una diversa percezione del problema razziale da parte dei giovani inglesi portò il blues bianco praticato dai britannici verso uno sviluppo virtuosistico e sperimentale che ben presto portò le principali band del blues-rock britannico ad abbandonare il genere entro la fine degli anni '60. Tuttavia prima che ciò avvenisse il blues-rock interpretato dai guitar hero britannici scalò le classifiche americane sulla scia della strada aperta dai gruppi della British Invasion e si legò alla musica psichedelica e alla cultura hippie. Il blues elettrico e virtuosistico praticato nella musica rock contribuì enormemente a far scoprire ai giovani bianchi americani e britannici il blues e suoi principali artisti. Tuttavia, come si resero conto gli stessi musicisti afroamericani che cominciarono ad esibirsi di fronte ad un pubblico bianco, il blues stesso subì una trasformazione in conseguenza della sua crescente popolarità presso il pubblico bianco. Il blues reinterpretato dai giovani bianchi tendeva a favorire il virtuosismo strumentale rispetto a quello vocale, ponendo al centro della scena la chitarra elettrica. Inoltre il blues venne reinterpretato secondo certi propri della cultura bianca occidentale. I musicisti ed il pubblico amavano il blues come una musica emozionale funzionale a soddisfare le proprie esigenze individualistico-esistenziali tendendo a mettere da parte elementi importanti della storia del genere come le interpreti femminili; i critici e gli studiosi cercavano di definire un canone in base al quale stabilire quale fosse l'autentico blues scevro da influenze commerciali ma così facendo lo estraniavano dalla sua storia e dai legami con la comunità afroamericane all'interno delle quali si era sempre trasformato ed evoluto in risposta ad esigenze e stimoli che furono anche di natura commerciale. L'industria discografica, infine, cercava di sfruttare l'interesse dei giovani rocker per il blues producendo album ed eventi live dove i giovani musicisti rocker suonavano e si esibivano coi i "padri nobili" del blues. D'altra parte il blues ha potuto acquisire una grande popolarità al di fuori della comunità afroamericana e del continente americano divenendo un genere musicale apprezzato e praticato in tutto il mondo ancora ai nostri giorni grazie al rock che lo ha celebrato come un suo nobile antesignano. The prodigious success of the Beatles in the U.S.A. paved the way for the American market for many bands and single artists from the British pop and rock music scene. Anything with a "British" flavor and accent immediately became interesting to the American public. Literature, theater, fashion, design, cinema, tourism, music: there was no sector of popular culture that was not affected to some extent by the British craze. This phenomenon known as the "British Invasion" constitutes the basic context within which the research in question moves: describe through what processes and for what reasons the blues was rediscovered and reinterpreted by scholars, folklorists and white musicians, what consequences this had in redefining the canons of the genre and what was the specific contribution of the English blues revival. The first chapter describes the spread of jazz in Great Britain starting from the late 10s of the twentieth century. Jazz in England, despite being opposed by the more conservative components of British society, poorly supported by institutional media such as the BBC, and hampered by the effects of the economic crisis of the 1930s, was able to take root and spread in Great Britain thanks to its organizational skills fielded by the followers of jazz who were able to create their own space and their own reference market through the foundation of associations such as the Rhythm Clubs, magazines, specialized shops, small independent labels and even music bands. Between the 1930s and 1940s the debate between the modernist supporters of be-pop and the traditionalist supporters of hot jazz of the 1920s favored the emergence of a specific interest in the blues. To better define which style of jazz to award the palm of authenticity, many jazz enthusiasts turned to deepen their knowledge and study of African American music as a whole and in particular of blues seen as a precursor of jazz. The blues revival, therefore, was a movement that took off from the field of English jazz and then developed independently. In the second part of the chapter (3 and 4 paragraphs) we tried to highlight the continuities and discontinuities existing between the world of jazz and blues in England. The followers of the blues, in fact, found themselves having to face problems very similar to those of their jazz predecessors such as the scarcity of record material and gave similar organizational responses. In particular, the world of blues revival inherited from that of jazz a serious and demanding approach to music fueled by a strong ideological element centered on the concept of musical authenticity. The second chapter describes the influence that the spread of American popular music had on the British teenagers of the 1950s and how this led many young British people to learn about the blues and to practice it along with a wide range of styles and genres of American popular music laying thus the foundation for that original reworking of American music which constituted one of the strengths of the British Invasion. Ample space is dedicated to placing the diffusion of musical genres such as rock 'n' roll and skiffle in the context of the profound economic, social, and customs changes that characterized post-war England and how these impacted youth cultures. The third chapter deals with outlining the growth of the English blues revival movement in the early 1960s following the foundation and first steps of some historic British blues-rock bands. The emphasis is on the pedagogical relationship that had arisen between the American artists who went to perform in England and the young British musicians who accompanied them on tour. An important section of the chapter endeavors to highlight the relationship between the world of British folk revival and the purely acoustic first phase of the English blues revival and as the electric breakthrough of British blues, inspired by Chicago Blues performers such as Muddy Waters, and carried out by pioneers such as Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, Chris Barber, favored an early detachment of the British blues from a purist vision of folk-derived blues that saw mainly, if not solely, the only true and authentic blues in acoustic blues. The fourth Chapter shifts its attention to the United States of America and tries to highlight some essential differences and meeting points between the American and British blues revival starting from the role of rock 'n' roll which in America was more of an obstacle that an element of promoting the blues among young whites. The blues revival in America remained linked for a long time to the world of folk revival which had developed an extremely purist conception of the blues by linking it to an acoustic and rural canon. The closest link between the American blues revival and the folk environment depended on various environmental and political factors. The discovery of blues by whites in America took place, much more than in England, through the work of folklorists and intellectuals of the countercultures who saw electric music as a gimmick used by the music industry to create artificial and inauthentic music. Furthermore, folk music, which enjoyed renewed popularity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, became the soundtrack of all those black and white protest movements that, especially in the early 1960s, were in favor of an integrationist solution to the American racial problem and therefore saw positively the promotion of African American culture. The Newport Folk Festival was the event that most fueled this folkloric vision of the blues which, however, hid a colonialist approach to African American culture on the part of whites who nevertheless promoted it. The Newport Folk Festival was the event that most fueled this folkloric vision of the blues which, however, hid a colonialist approach to African American culture on the part of whites who even promoted it. Precisely at the Newport Folk Festival, on the occasion of Bob Dylan's performance in 1965, the clash between the purist vision of blues typical of folk canon and the modernist vision embodied by the Paul Butterfield Blues band, in which white boys played of Chicago who had crossed the racial boundaries of American society and had gone to African American neighborhoods to learn the blues from the masters of the genre. The Newport incident made the Paul Butterfield blues band famous and gave a strong impetus to the electric style of the white blues, but it was mainly in England that the electric blues was consecrated as an authentic and foundational blues style of modern genres such as Rhythm & Blues, Rock 'N' Roll and the rising rock music. The greater freedom of expression that experienced the mature season of the blues revival in England due to less interdependence with the world of folk and a different perception of the racial problem by young Englishmen led the white blues practiced by the British towards a virtuosic and experimental development that it soon led to major British blues-rock bands abandoning the genre by the end of the 1960s. However, before this happened the blues-rock performed by British guitar heroes climbed the American charts in the wake of the road opened by the British Invasion groups and became linked to psychedelic music and hippie culture. The electric and virtuosic blues practiced in rock music contributed enormously to the discovery of blues and its main artists among young white Americans and British. However, as the same African American musicians who began performing in front of white audiences realized, the blues itself underwent a transformation as a result of its growing popularity with white audiences. The blues reinterpreted by young whites tended to favor instrumental virtuosity over vocal virtuosity, placing the electric guitar at the center of the stage. In addition, the blues was reinterpreted according to certain specifics of western white culture. The musicians and the public loved the blues as an emotional music functional to satisfy their individualistic-existential needs, tending to put aside important elements of the history of the genre such as female performers; critics and scholars tried to define a canon on the basis of which to establish which was the authentic blues free from commercial influences but in doing so they estranged it from its history and from the ties with the Afro-American community within which it had always transformed and evolved in response to needs and incentive that were also of a commercial nature. Finally, the record industry sought to exploit the interest of young rockers for the blues by producing albums and live events where young rocker musicians played and performed with the "noble fathers" of the blues.On the other hand, the blues was able to acquire great popularity outside the African American community and the American continent, becoming a genre of music that is appreciated and practiced all over the world even today thanks to the rock that celebrated it as its noble forerunner.

Figura esemplare per la comunità afroamericana, W.E.B. Du Bois (1898-1963), storico, sociologo, intellettuale e attivista politico, utilizzò la narrativa come ulteriore strumento di analisi sociale. Nel racconto La cometa (1920), soltanto Jim, un ragazzo di colore, e Julia, una ricca ed avvenente ragazza bianca, sopravvivono alle esalazioni mortali di una cometa in una distopica New York dell'inizio del ventesimo secolo. Du Bois fece ricorso a questo espediente narrativo per immaginare la possibile scomparsa dei pregiudizi razziali in un mondo con due soli superstiti, un nero e una bianca. Notevole esempio di prosa che è allo stesso tempo post-apocalittica, speculativa e proto-Afrofuturistica, La cometa si configura come controparte narrativa dei concetti critici – la «doppia coscienza», la «linea del colore» e il «velo» – elaborati da Du Bois nella pionieristica raccolta di saggi Le anime del popolo nero (1903). Il volume presenta il racconto per la prima volta in traduzione italiana con testo a fronte, corredato da una nota biografica e da un saggio introduttivo.An exemplary figure for the African-American community, historian, sociologist, intellectual and political activist, W.E.B. Du Bois (1898-1963) used fiction as a further instrument of social analysis. In the short story The Comet (1920), only Jim, a young black man, and Julia, a rich young white woman, survive the deadly gases of a comet in a dystopian early 20th-century New York. Du Bois employed this narrative device to speculate on whether racial prejudices could be erased in a world with only two survivors, a black boy and a white girl. A remarkable example of fiction that is simultaneously post-apocalyptic, speculative and proto-Afrofuturist, The Comet thus functions as a fictional counterpart of the critical insights – «double consciousness», the «color line» and the «veil» – previously introduced by Du Bois in the groundbreaking collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The volume presents for the first time an Italian parallel-text translation of The Comet, along with a biographical note and an introductory essay

Transnationalism (Assayag, 1998) was a lens which promised new analyses and interpretations, on the wave of impressive migratory phenomena, which have led the attention of anthropologists toward migration processes. As scholars pointed out, it is important to study transnational communities not only from the point of view of their constitution (Frigerio, 1997), but also of their political formation and their meaning, always political, in the homeland, in terms of prestige (Capone, 2004) and in the struggle for power.All the scholars of African American religions have always dealt with transnational phenomena, since this religious world has been established both in the Americas and in Europe just in interweave between deterritorialization and constant contacts with Africa.In the case of italian candomblé, after a first period in which some priests or priestesses experienced with more or less good outcomes the acquisition of new initiates, when the communities have settled down, began the race for the appropriation of a religious descent. That is, while from the 1990s to today, the expansion in Italy had practically no echoes, and the communities, with italian candomblé priests, had only utilitarian contacts with Africa and Brazil and did not build a true network, in the last two years some communities had proposals from other sanctuary lines, in an attempt of appropriation that makes visible how religious migration can become an instrument of prestige and power for both African and Brazilian traditions and lead to projects that probably precede a transnational phase, still to be built. ; In quest'ultimo decennio, con brevi antecedenti, anche il mondo dell'antropologia ha frequentemente dibattuto al suo interno e con il mondo sociologico i concetti di globalizzazione e poi di transnazionalismo (Assayag, 1998), una nuova lente, dopo quella della globalizzazione, che sembrava promettere nuove analisi e interpretazioni, sulla scia dei fenomeni migratori sempre più imponenti, che hanno portato, anche in Italia, una attenzione degli antropologi, dopo quella dei sociologi, ben più antica, al mondo della migrazione.Ovviamente, è del tutto naturale, aldilà del dibattito sul pro e contro di questa prospettiva, cercare nuove vie interpretative che affiancano, attraverso gli anni, il cambiamento dello sguardo dell'antropologo, tuttavia sarebbe opportuno non soltanto studiare le comunità transnazionali dal punto di vista della loro costituzione (Frigerio, 1997) etc., ma vederne anche il lato politico della loro formazione e il significato, sempre politico che hanno nella loro patria di origine, in termini di prestigio (Capone, 2004) e nella lotta per la preminenza di singoli individui.Come indicano praticamente tutti gli studi sulle religioni afro-americane (vodu, santeria, candomblé, umbanda etc.), da sempre, anche se in modi diversi, si è avuto a che fare con fenomeni transnazionali, in quanto questo mondo religioso si è costituito sia nelle Americhe e ora in Europa proprio nell'intreccio fra deterritorializzazione e continui e costanti contatti con la patria di origine.Nel caso italiano relativo al candomblé, dopo un primo periodo « pionieristico », lasciato ad alcuni pais o mães-de-santo, tutti della stessa « linea » religiosa, che hanno sperimentato con esiti più o meno felici l'acquisizione di nuovi iniziati in Italia, considerati soprattutto come un supporto finanziario alle loro attività in Brasile, nel momento dell'assestamento delle comunità, è partita la gara per l'appropriazione di una discendenza religiosa. Cioè, mentre dagli anni Novanrta a oggi, l'espansione in Italia non ha avuto praticamente echi e le comunità, con sacerdoti italiani, hanno avuto contatti con Africa e Brasile più utilitaristici che di costruzione di una vera rete, negli ultimi due anni alcune comunità sono state raggiunte da proposte da parte di apparteneneti ad altre linee di santuari, in un tentativo di appropriazione che rende visibile da un lato come la migrazione religiosa possa trasformarsi in uno strumento di prestigio e di potere sia per le tradizioni africane che per quelle brasiliane e, dall'altro, a progetti che probabilmente preludono a una fase transnazionale, tutta da costruire.

La ricerca ricostruisce in chiave genealogica i fondamenti teorici e concettuali della cosiddetta tradizione radicale nera del XX secolo, qui interpretata come una critica della modernità, attraverso l'analisi del pensiero politico dell'abolizionismo nero. Più precisamente, è ricostruito dal punto di vista della storia dei concetti politici moderni il pensiero politico prodotto dai principali esponenti delle lotte contro la schiavitù condotte nello spazio transnazionale dell'Atlantico tra la seconda metà del XVIII e la prima metà del XIX secolo. L'abolizionismo nero è letto come un pensiero politico articolato secondo una costante appropriazione sovversiva del lessico e dei concetti politici moderni. Si mostra che la critica nera agisce secondo due linee costanti: lo 'sdoppiamento' dei concetti politici (cioè un movimento di appropriazione e trasformazione) e la sovversione degli assetti spaziali della modernità (cioè la rottura della distinzione tra Stato e colonia). Gli elementi di maggiore originalità del lavoro sono individuabili tanto sul piano contenutistico quanto su quello metodologico. Anzitutto, si tratta del primo studio dell'abolizionismo nero visto da una prospettiva atlantica e di storia concettuale. Il lavoro analizza inoltre diverse tipologie di fonti (petizioni, autobiografie, proclami militari, regolamenti amministrativi, discorsi, romanzi e slave songs) solitamente marginali nella Storia delle dottrine politiche. La tesi è strutturata il quattro capitoli. Nel primo capitolo è presentata un'analisi per temi e concetti del radicalismo nero novecentesco. I tre capitoli successivi sono invece dedicati all'abolizionismo nero e sono strutturati secondo una scansione cronologica volta a individuare tre momenti di discontinuità. Il secondo capitolo discute l'emergere della critica nera durante la rivoluzione americana e all'interno del movimento antischiavista britannico. Il terzo capitolo è invece dedicato alla Rivoluzione di Haiti, interpretata come cesura fondamentale nella storia dell'abolizionismo nero. Il quarto capitolo analizza infine il movimento abolizionista afroamericano. ; The dissertation provides a genealogy of the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the black radical tradition through a reconstruction of the political discourse and practices of the main black abolitionists of the Atlantic World from the so-called Age of Revolutions to the end of the American Civil War. In particular, the black radical tradition is conceived as a peculiar critique of modernity. Indeed, black critique highlights the constitutive duplicity of modernity (i.e. European and colonial) and produces both a 'provincialization' and a transformation of the basic concepts of modern political thought (such as freedom, equality, democracy, nation). In this way, the research shows that black abolitionism is a political thought characterized by two elements: the subversion of modern spatiality and the "doubling" of political concepts. On the one hand, black abolitionism overturns the conceptual distinction between the State, as the space of order, and the colony, as an irrational and uncivilized place. In other words, it shows that slavery, colonialism, and racism are not peripheral moments of modernity but instead one of its foundations. On the other hand, black abolitionists used different political lexicons to communicate a struggle for self-liberation which had its own conceptual originality. The dissertation is structured in four chapters. The first provides a definition of the theoretical foundations of black radicalism in the XX Century, and is focused on some of its main figures. The other chapters provide a reconstruction of the political thought of black abolitionism, defined by three moments of discontinuity. The second chapter is dedicated to the black abolitionists within the American Revolution and the British abolitionist movement. The third chapter is on the Haitian Revolution, conceived as the fundamental turning point in the history of black abolitionism and its critique of modernity. The last chapter is on the African American abolitionist movement.

The Author analyses the comparative legal profiles of citizenship in the constitutional legal orders of some African, Latin American and Asian countries, providing brief examples. The paper focuses on the following aspects: a) language problems raised by the comparison of different legal orders; b) the concept of citizenship in constitutional law; c) the relationship between the legal status of citizenship and forms of State; d) the configuration of citizenship in Islamic law and in federal States; e) conditions for the acquisition and the deprivation of citizenship, solutions to cases of double nationality, the international effort to tackle statelessness. Adapted from the source document.

The article analyzes the debate on "racial" or "ethnic voting" in postapartheid South Africa, looking at its implications for democratic theory. A critical review is offered of "sociological" (culture- & class-based) as well as "psychological" & political communication explanations for the unexpected tendency of the 'coloured' voters in the Cape area to "betray" the African National Congress & line up with the white electorate after 1993. An alternative explanation is also offered that seeks to combine elements from the theory of cleavages, class voting theory, & the Downsian theory of elections. It is based on the application of some recent developments of European & American rational choice sociology to the genesis of voting preferences, as well as on the concept of language repertoire & central place theory. Finally, some possible adjustments to the liberal democratic model in contexts marked by economic, language, culture, & geographic differentials are recommended from within the theoretical framework of the neo-contractarian views of democracy. 8 Tables, 2 Figures, 72 References. Adapted from the source document.

In October 1573, the Spanish army carried out the bloodless conquest of Tunis with a carefully planned operation. The direct government of the city was an unprecedented experiment in the long traditional rule of the Spanish Crown. Having to ensure the power of a heavily armed minority over a larger group of people prone to rebellion, John of Austria (the Younger) experimented with a hybrid type of domination, which while it retained its "African" characteristics needed to be guided by the experiences of American colonization and the way large Italian and Flemish cities were occupied by foreign powers. To prevent tensions, crime or a possible outbreak of fighting, the spaces devoted to each religious group were strictly defined, nearly producing a ghettoisation of the entire urban space. The predisposed solutions, however, failed to ensure the peaceful coexistence between people and the occupying forces; the arrival of the Turkish fleet in 1574 put a bloody end to this experience. The analysis of the ephemeral experiment of Spanish rule in Tunisia leads to a re-discussion of Braudel's paradigm of "limited occupation" and a renewed reflection on the peculiar condition of Spanish presidios in Africa.

From its colonial history, the twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago inherited a uniquely diverse population of 1.3 million, including descendants of East Indians, Africans, Chinese, Syrians and Lebanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and British, among others. The legacy of the British divide et impera, paired with the perceived ethnic diversity, has been marking and re-producing a deep "Us vs. Them" division, especially between the two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%). For over forty years, the two ethnic groups have been struggling for political control through census counts and voting along ethnic lines. Although elections in the country have always served as "the critical arbiter in adjudicating the rival claims by the main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege" (Premdas 2004: 19), the 2010 General Election seemed to have marked a turning point in the history of the nation. On May 24th, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female Prime Minister and only the second person of East Indian origin to hold the PM office in 48 years of independence. Breaking out of the country's rigid bipolar political mould, Persad-Bissessar won as the leader of the People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. She defeated Patrick Manning's People's National Movement and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of the 41 in the House of Representatives. Taking this unprecedented political success as its starting point, this dissertation explores the discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar's election, analyzing a large corpus of textual and visual data from the People's Partnership campaign. The starting assumption is that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered coalition party but also by discursively positing a new, inclusive identity space throughout the campaign and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in the country. Therefore, I set to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, defining her role as the first woman PM candidate in the history of the country, legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalisms, as well as fostering a wider national sense of belonging. As political communication has increasingly grown beyond the realm of verbal language, understanding Persad-Bissessar's political meaning-making required both the analysis of her election speeches as well as the study of a number of multimodal texts, such as video and printed ads as well as official portraits, which played a crucial role in the political advertising of her coalition. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I will combine the 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (Wodak and Meyer 2009) for the analysis of Persad-Bissessar's textual data and Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) 'Visual Grammar' for the analysis of the visual data. Although the English-speaking Caribbean is home to the largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries around the globe, political discourse from the archipelago is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. The analysis of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago has the potential to shed light on the complexities, struggles and contradictions of the postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago by integrating knowledge about historical sources and the social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. Starting from the analysis of political discourse, this work aims at offering a new, discursive perspective on ethnicity, identity and power in Trinidad and Tobago as well as increasing scholarly awareness for the development of a critical interpretative stance for political texts and talks beyond the Euro-American zone.

The so-called "human zoos" represented an incredibly widespread and extremely popular phenomenon in 19th-early 20th century Europe, at the age of the great national, international and universal exhibitions, of which they were a recurrent and a nearly constant element. The "human zoos" were brutish forms of public exhibitions of specimens of "savage" (mostly African) humans purposely imported as exotic animals from overseas by specialised merchants and entrepreneurs and hosted in "indigenous villages" very carefully and minutely reproduced within the exhibition areas. Such public displays - true ethno-anthropological shows in which the exotic actors were supposed to "play" their native daily habits, craftsmanship, arts, dances, songs and religious rites - contributed in an important albeit appalling way to Western Europe self-perception as an advanced, modern and "civilsed" society and culture, to be efficaciously contrasted with primitive or just diverse forms of human ways of living. The expanding, aggressively militarist, imperialist and colonising West could proudly look at itself in the mirror offered by the spectacle of a human alterity exhibited in its most demaning forms; and in that contrast it could find a clear confirmation of the importance of its civilising mission in the world. Several recent books have explored this phenomenon in the social and cultural history of many West-European and American countries: Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, the United States. This book for the first time investigates the great variety of living human public exhibitions in 19th-20th century Italy, between the liberal era and Fascism. It connects these examples of public exhibitions to an ancient tradition of triumphs and freak shows and underlines the close relationships with colonial politics and ideology, with the development of anthropology and the medical sciences as academic disciplines in Italy and with catholic missionary activities in Africa, the Near East and South America. In so doing this book suggests the need to enlarge the very notion of "human zoos", which aptly defines a particularly brutal, even if very common form of living human exhibition, but which cannot be applied to other, themselves very widespread aspects of human shows, such as ethnic theatre, missionary exhibitions and colonial-imperial exhibitions based not so much on the public show of a degraded savagery, but on the apology of the civilising capacity of colonial and imperial institutions. In so doing, this book offers an original insight into Italian public opinion and sensibilities in matters of human varieties, race, civilization, globalization, modernity and the non-European world; and it tries to assess, in comparison with other European cases, the specifities of Italian attitudes toward human ethnic diversities and colonialism. The book is enriched by a very large section of "Illustrations" reproducing original and often previously unpublished images and archive documents; and it is closed by a wide, 50 pages bibliography. ; I cosiddetti "zoo umani" rappresentarono un fenomeno di vastissima diffusione e popolarità nell'Europa delle grandi esposizioni nazionali, internazionali e universali a partire dalla metà dell'800. Forme spesso brutali di pubblica esibizione di esemplari di umanità selvaggia, gli "zoo umani", completi di "villaggi" ricostruiti nel dettaglio e popolati di "indigeni" importati come animali da esposizione, costituirono un ingrediente importante – per quanto raccapricciante – della mentalità e dell'auto-rappresentazione dell'Occidente "progredito", imperialista e colonizzatore. Grazie a questo libro, dopo che numerosi studi hanno indagato il fenomeno in larga parte del mondo occidentale (Germania, Francia, Inghilterra, Stati Uniti, Spagna, Svizzera, Russia, Danimarca) disponiamo ora della prima ricerca sistematica sulle "esposizioni umane" nell'Italia liberale e fascista, viste non solo nella loro funzione politico-ideologica, ma anche in rapporto ai loro antecedenti storici più antichi e nella varietà di declinazioni che, ben oltre la nozione restrittiva di "zoo umani", esse assunsero nel mondo dello spettacolo, in quello delle attività missionarie oltremare e negli ambienti della ricerca medica e antropologica.