RMST100

RMST100

Italian Fashion Cultures

Cross-listed with ITAL110

Milano Fashion Week & Design, 02/2011 | Source: Flickr (Mat's Eye)

In 2022, Italy’s newly-elected, right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, re-named a previous trade ministry as the “Ministry for Business and Made in Italy,” thereby invoking a key marker of Italian commercial, group, and cultural identity. Since the end of the WWII, the garment and accessories sector has been traditionally recognized as a pillar within the Made in Italy industries.

“Italian Fashion Cultures” examines both the national history of Italian fashion since the post-WWII period and its global dimensions. The course delineates the dynamics among the country’s fashion capitals (Florence, Rome, and Milan), with a focus on the apparel sector’s growth during the 1950s-1970s. We also probe how and why Italian fashion has developed in response to the clothing sector’s exigencies and creative tension with France, the United States, and China.

The course highlights ready-to-wear and fast fashion, the two most significant categories of the fashion world today. Cultural appropriation, decoloniality, and sustainability are examined throughout the course in relation to the course’s primary texts, including fashion journalism, websites, social media, advertising, literature, films, and artworks.

Students are encouraged to consider three central questions:

(1) how clothing is represented in the primary texts to influence the audience’s cognitive and affective knowledge;

(2) how fashion helps forge individual, brand, national, and other cultural identities;

(3) given the ubiquitous presence of fashion branding, how these narratives articulate the Made in Italy cachet to consumers?

The course does not assume student’s prior knowledge of Italy or Italian fashion. Oral presentations and a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing) are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Regular attendance in class lecturing and participation in group discussions and in-class activities are essential for developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

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Grading Breakdown

Final project: 35%
Prospectus: 15%
Three “Fashion Stories” (improvised oral presentations) and written reports: 30%
Final oral presentations: 10%
Class participation, regular attendance, and professionalism: 10%

Readings

Coming soon

FREN395A

La représentation de Lyon dans les médias

This course is an experiential learning and immersive summer intensive 3 weeks course that takes students outside the classroom to engage in the course material in a real world setting, through visits of Lyon and the complex connections between art and the real world. We will work towards opening up your understanding of the variations of the French language in a local cultural context (Lyon patois). With an approach that is hands-on, collaborative and inclusive, the course develops comprehension and the mobilisation of knowledge such as savoir-faire, savoir-être and specific elements related to as study abroad program such as intercultural and interpersonal skills.

Offered in French and in Lyon (France), this course explores the vibrant literary and media culture of Lyon, through documents such as poems, graphic novels, comics, documentaries and movies. The course’s assignments will be submitted on Canvas and will reflect a diversity of format in respect to the Universal Design approach, from individual to group work, from text analysis to writing your own journal of your experience in Lyon with an exposure to drawings and creative writing with local experts.

Required readings:

1) Author: Collectif
Title: Chroniques des quartiers de Lyon
Publisher: Lyon capitale
Date of publication: 2019
ISBN: 978-2-490160-00-6
Site: https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/produit/chroniques-des-quartiers-de-lyon

2) Author: MAULAN Fachri
Title: Trabouler
Publisher: Libel
Date of publication: 2020
ISBN: 978-2-491924-02-7

3) Author: Paul Fournel
Title: Le bel appétit
Publisher: P.O.L
Date of publication: 2015
ISBN: 978-2-8180-3630-3

4) Author: Étienne Lécroart
Title: À table
Publisher: Lajouanie
Date of publication: 2014
ISBN: 978-2370470034

Other texts and media will be posted on Canvas or distributed in class.

Recommended readings:

Author : Bernard Poche
Title : Lyon tel qu’il s’écrit
Publisher: Presses Universitaires de Lyon .
Date of publication : OER 2020 [2015]
OER: https://books.openedition.org/pul/8436?lang=fr

Language of instruction: French

Recommendation: CEFR A2 French proficiency level. For example: One of FREN 202 or equivalent.

E c’erano gerani rossi dappertutto

2024 | Edited by Michela Valmori & Valentina Di Cesare

Publisher: Radici Edizioni

Description:

E c’erano gerani rossi dappertutto presents a collection of 16 narratives authored by Italian North-American women, exploring their immigrant experiences. This volume delves into the multifaceted journeys of 16 female writers of Italian heritage, offering poignant insights into their experiences as immigrants in North America. Through a series of narratives, the book encapsulates the diverse array of challenges, triumphs, and cultural adaptations encountered by these women within the context of migration.

Full description

E c’erano gerani rossi dappertutto raccoglie alcune tra le numerose voci del panorama letterario nordamericano contemporaneo, in un vero e proprio viaggio attraverso il loro patrimonio identitario, sulle tracce dell’esperienza migratoria familiare e personale. Una antologia eterogenea dal punto di vista geografico e anagrafico, concepita sulla base di elementi ben definiti, come l’origine etnica e il genere socialmente inteso e che ospita percorsi artistici differenti. Le autrici – tutte di origini italiane – fanno i conti con il proprio passato familiare, presentando percezioni diverse della propria identità all’interno di entrambe le comunità, quella di arrivo e quella italiana d’origine. Il risultato è un’opera multiforme, sospesa tra retrospezione e introspezione, caratterizzata da una pluralità di sguardi in cui ciascuna scrittrice, a modo proprio, disseppellisce un personale forziere dai fondali di un oceano di memorie e sensazioni, parole e silenzi. Per riportarlo a galla con narrazioni piene di onestà e coraggio.

The Crimean War and Cultural Memory: The War France Won and Forgot

2023 | Sima Godfrey

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Full description:

The Crimean War (1854–56) is widely considered the first modern war with its tactical use of railways, telegraphs, and battleships, its long-range rifles, and its notorious trenches – precursors of the Great War. It is also the first media war: the first to know the impact of a correspondent on the field of battle and the first to be documented in photographs. No one, however, including the French themselves, seems to remember that France was there, fighting in Crimea, losing 95,000 soldiers and leading the Allied campaign to victory. It would seem that the Crimean War has no place in the canon of culturally retained historical events that define modern French identity.

Looking at literature, art, theatre, material objects, and medical reports, The Crimean War and Cultural Memory considers how the Crimean War was and was not represented in French cultural history in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the book illuminates the forgotten traces that the Crimean War left on the French cultural landscape.

Politically Animated: Non-fiction Animation from the Hispanic World

2023 | Jennifer Nagtegaal

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Full description:

Politically Animated studies the convergence of animation and actuality within films, television series, and digital shorts from across the Spanish-speaking world. It interrogates the many ways in which animation as a stylistic tool and storytelling device participates in political projects underpinning an array of non-fiction works.

The case studies in the book cover a diverse geographical scope, including Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. They critically analyse different works such as feature-length animated documentary films, a work of animated journalism, a short-animated essay, and micro-short episodes from a televised animated documentary series. Jennifer Nagtegaal employs the term “politically animated” in reference to the ideological implications of choosing specific techniques and styles of animation within certain socio-historical and cultural contexts.

Nagtegaal illuminates the creative union of animated documentary and the comics medium currently being exploited by Spanish and Latin American cartoonists and filmmakers alike. By paying particular attention to cultural production beyond the big screen, Politically Animated continues to stretch the bounds of animated documentary scholarship.

Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy

2023 | Edited by Gaoheng Zhang & Valentina Pedone

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Full description:

This book offers a critical analysis of global mobilities across China and Italy in history. In three periods in the twentieth century, new patterns of physical mobilities and cultural contact were established between the two countries which were either novel at the time of their emergence or impactful on subsequent periods. The first two chapters provide overviews of writings by Italians in China and by Chinese in Italy in the twentieth century. The remaining chapters cover: Republican China’s relationships with Italy and Italian Fascist colonialism in China during the 1920s–1930s; Italian travelers to China during the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1970s; migrations between China and Italy during the 2000s–2010s. In analyzing these cultural mobilities, this book opens a new line of inquiry in Chinese-Italian Cultural Studies, which has been dominated by historical study, and contributes a significant case study to the scholarship on global cultural mobilities.

Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy

FREN556B

Race, Ethnicity and Language

This course is based on the fundamental idea that discourse practices are an important indicator of wider social and cultural structures. Language has a key role to play in the racial and ethnic boundary-making processes, as it is a vehicle for the ideologies that get attached to racialized and ethnicized subjects. It is through language that racial and ethnic ideologies are produced and reproduced, perpetuated and resisted.

This course takes interest in the construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic boundaries through the use of language. This course is built around two main questions:

  1. If race and ethnicity are ways of categorizing identity (rather than being inherited essences of identity), then how and why are race and ethnicity so powerful in shaping social life and experience?
  2. If race, ethnicity, and language are social constructs, how can we (as citizens, students, and scholars) represent and discuss these concepts without reifying them?

We will read a range of ethnographies and articles that seek to overcome these dilemmas.

Language of instruction: French

Instructor: Dr. Marie-Eve Bouchard 

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Grading Breakdown

Coming soon!

Readings

  • All readings will be available on Canvas.

ITAL232

Nation, Empire, Democracy in the Age of Modern Capitalism: Italy as a Model Case

Garibaldi at the Battle of Calatafimi (1860) - painting by C. H. Granger

The two recurring, competing (but, also, interwoven) issues of national identity vs. global empire (lat. Imperium) are explored in this course by studying historical, political, literary, cinematographic and cultural evidence from Italy: a country which, despite its miniature size by world standards, displays all the features of a poignant and a revealing historical model case, and has been able to condense into a nutshell today’s main historical concepts.

We pursue “Nation, Empire, Democracy” through the five most recent phases of Italian (and European, and global) history, which in our case are: 1, Romanticism and Risorgimento (1815-1860/70); 2, imperialism (1860/70-1919); 3, Fascism (1919-1945); 4, the high industrial age of nation-states (1945-1993); and 5, late global capitalism (since the creation of Maastricht’s European Union) (1993-?), with its current financial, trade, energy, ecological, and demographic imbalances.

Required readings:

  • Excerpts from literary and historical works, as will be POSTED ON CANVAS.
  • Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796, Penguin 2008.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Language of instruction: English

FREN485

Early Encounters: Travel Literature and Colonial Writing in French

This course explores narratives of travel and exploration in French from 1500 to 1800 and their relationship to colonization, gender, unfamiliar culture and nature, knowledge production and representations of the self and others. We will study “early encounters” across the globe positioning France within a planetary framework. This course will engage with French travelers to India, South and North America (Canada), Africa and the Caribbean. We will historicize the very notion of travel and geography as we closely read our texts. Along the way, we will address crucial topics that move us today, including migration, colonization, territorial exploration, borders, gendered spaces, ecology, multilingualism and the feeling of (non-)belonging.

Prerequisites: One of FREN 321, FREN 328, FREN 329 and one of FREN 402, FREN 225.

Language of instruction: French

RMST341

How Things Change: Shifting Identities and Perceptions in Medieval and Early Modern Italy

Giotto, Nativity, detail. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy. | The Virgin Mary looks at her newborn child, Jesus, as he looks back at her. We see here the inception of art as expression not just of traditional sacred story, but of human consciousness as experience of a fully embodied identity, a coming together of intelligence, emotions, intuitions and sensations.

This is a course that aims at blending the visual and the literary arts that flourished in the Italian peninsula from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. We will follow a chronological order, moving from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio to Pico, Machiavelli and Castiglione, from Giotto to Leonardo.

We will also pay attention to where these art forms occurred geographically, as different centers of patronage became prominent at different moments in time. We will therefore look at Palermo and Sicily during the 12th and 13th centuries, Florence and Tuscany from the 13th to the 16th, Milan-Venice in the 15th and 16th; finally, approaching the Rome of the Renaissance will also give us the opportunity to look at her ancient, classical heritage.

We will read excerpts from some of the major texts that were produced in these various areas, and familiarize ourselves with the evolution of the visual arts.

If you are planning a trip to Italy at some point in the future, don’t miss this course! Decisions on where to go, where to stay and which wines to taste will rest on your organizational skills; but, having taken this course, you will know all the ins and outs necessary to plan a culturally exciting journey and decide for yourselves which regions’ cultural identities are closer to your interests.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Daniela Boccassini

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

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Grading Breakdown

Coming soon!

Readings

Required texts:

There are no required books to buy. Required texts are available online, or will be made available via Canvas.

Selections from the following Primary Texts (either excerpts in PDF or available online):
— Dante, Vita nuova +The Divine Comedy.
— Boccaccio, Decameron.
— Petrarca, Canzoniere and other works.
— Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man.
— Machiavelli, The Prince.
— Castiglione, The Courtier.

Recommended texts:

Kaborycha, Lisa. A Short History of the Italian Renaissance. Routledge 2024 (online access via UBC library).

Schneider Adams, Laurie. Italian Renaissance Art. Taylor and Francis, 2014 (online access via UBC library).