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Thinking on foot : new Italian pilgrimages in the work of Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar

Funding: Leverhulme Trust.The catalogue to Rome-based Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s Europa exhibition of 2015 includes a short excerpt from Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought entitled “Thinking on Foot”. This article maps key elements of Cassano’s essay, namely the focus on “Mediterranean” values of slowness, contemplation, and conviviality onto readings of Italy-based works by Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar, all of which provide capacious ways to rethink the idea of pilgrimage. Reflecting on the sites, sights and routes that form the basis of these works, the article shows how they represent pilgrimage as a slow form of contemporary cultural mobility, one concerned with deep contemplation of place as a response to experiences of loss, displacement and exile. Sacred journeying is experienced here through instances of micro-travel, such as walking, standing and looking, and personal transformation is charted through moments of slow thought and memory-work, as captured in multiple, mobile artistic forms.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Reversing the gaze : image and text in the public debate over Italian colonialism

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Irony as a way of life : Svevo, Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis

Dejected by decades of commercial and critical failure, the Triestine author Italo Svevo found fresh inspiration for his final novel (La coscienza di Zeno, 1923) in the writings of Freud. Yet critics have always puzzled over his declared intransigence toward his new master, often attributing this ambivalence to a simple defence mechanism. But what if Svevo had been reading other works simultaneously, works that challenged and exposed the weaknesses of psychoanalytic authority? As this article argues, Svevo’s recently discovered reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘existential irony’ sheds light on his conception of the power of both narrative and the analytical process itself.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Looking sideways to Italy in contemporary world literature

This article sketches a history of how the concept of Italy has travelled worldwide to become a mobile cultural symbol in order to show how, as a signifier, “Italy” has also become increasingly detached from any national parameters of territory. It employs a lateral method of “looking sideways” at literary representations of Italy from “outside” the national canon to show how they can put pressure on what (and where) Italian culture now resides. Analyzing three contemporary works of world literature partially set in Italy (Daša Drndić’s Trieste, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing), it suggests that we might consider broadening out the canon of transnational Italian literature to include works neither written by Italians nor written in Italian, but that offer sideways insight into Italian history and culture from elsewhere.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Between memory and matter : Italy and the transnational dimensions of public art

Funding: This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant PLP-2019-029.This article identifies a set of precarious, temporary, and travelling forms of commemoration that have been expressed in recent public artworks connected to Italy, and proposes them as case studies that together can enhance our understanding of how transnational memory is formed and functions across borders. These complex processes of memory-making are illustrated through a comparative analysis of Wes Anderson’s Bar Luce (2015), Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013), and Muna Mussie’s Oblio (2021). The selected works, which together add transnational nuance to James E. Young’s concept of the ‘counter-monument’, enshrine the creativity which can reside in acts of forgetting and misremembering, in experiencing things second-hand or at a distance, and in re-materialising memory through tropes of ephemerality, portability, and dislocation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Designing Sugaropolis:digital games as a medium for conveying transnational narratives

In this paper, the authors present a case study of ‘Sugaropolis’: a two-year practice-based project that involved interdisciplinary co-design and stakeholder evaluation of two digital game prototypes. Drawing on the diverse expertise of the research team (game design and development, human geography, and transnational narratives), the paper aims to contribute to debates about the use of digital games as a medium for representing the past. With an emphasis on design-as-research, we consider how digital games can be (co-)designed to communicate complex histories and geographies in which people, objects, and resources are connected through space and time

From snap to selfcare : reading feminism through Sara Ahmed and Phoebe Boswell

How can we bring two feminist bodies of work that operate through different media into meaningful conversation with one another? Using Fournier’s framework of autotheory, we work through this question by reading Sara Ahmed’s critical theory and Phoebe Boswell’s creative practice connectively, tracing intersectional feminist pedagogies and key concepts common to both as we go. Instead of applying critical theory to creative practices, we use creative practices as a tool to better understand how theory can be in ‘touch’ with the world. Co-writing this article is an initial step in seeking out the creative and embodied aspects of our own practice as feminist researchers.PostprintPeer reviewe

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