Suchergebnisse

This article investigates the role, reception, and socio-cultural, political relevance of mondo movies in the context of late 1950s–early 1980s film and documentary. The mondo genre debuted with reportage films about sexuality in Europe and reached its pinnacle with Gualtiero Jacopetti's assemblage films. The historical context in which this genre evolved, and white masculinity was rearticulated and positioned at the centre of the national imagined community, is mapped focusing both on gender and race constructions and on the gaze identifying, encoding and decoding the sensationalist presentation of postcolonial/ decolonising Otherness. A brief review of some of the author's published work on 1962–1971 mondo movies introduces Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and director Ruggero Deodato's controversial reflection on the white, capitalist, sexist, Western and neo-colonial anthropological gaze. ; Il presente articolo vuole indagare, nella cornice della produzione documentaristica e cinematografica tra la fine degli anni cinquanta e l'inizio degli anni ottanta, il ruolo, la ricezione e il significato culturale, sociale e politico del cosiddetto filone dei mondomovie, inauguratosi con i reportage sulla sessualità in Europa e solidificatosi nei collage di Gualtiero Jacopetti. Il contesto storico in cui esso si sviluppa verrà cartografato e ricostruito a partire da un'analisi che pone al centro le costruzioni di genere e razza: un'analisi dello 'sguardo' che identifica, codifica e decodifica la cosiddetta diversità sensazionalistica mi permetterà di comprendere come si riarticolò in questa fase storica la mascolinità bianca in Italia e come essa venne riposizionata al centro della comunità immaginata nazionale. In questa cornice, e all'interno di un'analisi che riepiloga alcuni dei miei studi già pubblicati sui mondomovies prodotti tra il 1962 e il 1971 (Giuliani 2017 and 2018), procederò ad analizzare Cannibal Holocaust di Ruggero Deodato (1981) per la riflessione controversa che ha offerto sulla natura neocoloniale e occidentale, bianca, capitalista e sessista dello sguardo antropologico.

In the wake on important research published in the last 15 years, this article aims to explore contemporary rearticulations of racial contructions of Italians as white and Mediterranean. It is founded on the idea that these constructions of whiteness and Mediterraneanness – where Mediterraneannes, as opposed to Aryanness, is a result of a complex conversion of historical and racial components in the discourse on Italians' white identity – are a long-lasting and find their origins in the nation-building process. These constructions then underwent through important rearticulations in the reappraisal of the national identity and body politics during the Liberal Age, Fascism and finally the Republic. Through a methodology that intersects political philosophy, cultural, postcolonial and gender studies, the article investigates Mediterranean whiteness in current Italy as the result of a complex intertwining of Fascist legacies and postfascist dynamics. These legacies and dynamics include what I have called "symbolic anthropophagy" – drawing the concept from latin American decolonial and African-American feminist critiques – ideas of miscegenation and proximity/differences with the black race. These legacies and dynamics are interpreted contraputally in the context of the current rearticulations of race, gender and nation at the time of mass migrations and border control strategies.

Drawing on the book Bianco e nero. Storia dell'identita razziale degli Itallani, this lecture traces the political, cultural and visual history of Italian racial identity from unificaiton to the economic boom, through Fascism and the post-war era. Gaia Giuliani uses analytical categories derived from political philosophy, critical race theory, whiteness studies and postcolonial studies, and examines political theories of race, scientific literature and legislation related to emigration in order to trace the different processes of self-racialisation in the political discourse from the unification period up to 1936. The lecture also looks at contemporary Italian racism, analysing mass culture products (1980s-2007), TV coverage of racist incidents (2010-2012), and the intertwining of masculinity, virility, whtieness and race in Berlusconi's sexual scandals.