The association of the mafia with Italy is one of a handful of prevailing cultural metaphors about the country that unfailingly provoke a broad spectrum of impassioned responses from both Italians and non-Italians. This course argues that cinema has fundamentally shaped our perceptions and emotions about the mafia. We trace the lineaments of a cinematic genre born from the American and Italian milieus: the mafia movie. Diverse theses about Italian-origin organized crime, including the Cosa Nostra, Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, Banda della Magliana, and others, are proposed in these films, which sometimes highlight anti-mafia activities and individuals. We conduct formal film analysis while attending to the socio-historical and cultural contexts of the production of the films or the historical periods depicted in the films. The guiding question of the course is not whether these filmic representations accurately depict the mafia and their contestations. Rather, we seek to unravel the representational complexities, intentions, and agendas of the movies and of the genre. In this way, we gain a cinematic key to understanding Italian mafia which complements relevant historical and empirical studies.
Critical essay 1: 25%
Critical essay 2: 25%
Four improvised oral presentations and written reports: 40%
Class participation, regular attendance, and professionalism: 10%
From Roma to Nueva Yol: Urban Experiences across Romance Cultures
Which cities organize the Romance Speaking world? How do artists, writers, and thinkers represent these cities and their experiences dwelling in places as different as Montréal, Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, or Rome?
This course explores cities in literature, cinema, music, and other cultural productions in Romance Languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc.). With the help of secondary critical texts, we will give special attention to the social, cultural and geographical context of key cities as depicted throughout history. We will examine how artists and storytellers of these various cultural expressions have presented the many roles that cities play and map out in urban daily lives.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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 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.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
