45 research outputs found
Maltese journalism 1838-1992 : an historical overview
No full textIn Maltese Journalism 1838-1992 Henry Frendo looks critically at newspapers as these originated and developed in Malta. A former daily newspaper editor and UN information officer in Geneva, Professor Frendo directs the University of Malta's history seminar on Maltese journalism, which he started in 1990. Since 1968 Henry Frendo has been a columnist or features writer in Malta News, Il-Haddiem, Il-Hajja, The Bulletin, It- Torca, Illum, Il-Mument, The Sunday Times and In-Nazzjon, and has taken an active part in radio and television programmes. The author of several books on Maltese history, his general academic interests relate to modern and contemporary Europe and the Commonwealth.peer-reviewe
Nerik Mizzi in Italia prima della Prima Guerra Mondiale: gli anni della formazione
No full textIl testo riproduce la conferenza tenuta da Henry Frendo a Urbino il 14 luglio 2012 (si veda nelle pagine precedenti Nerik Mizzi honoured in Urbino, che è la comunicazione che ne è stata data nei giornali maltesi). La traduzione è della dott. Maria Luisa Biccari.The text reproduces the conference held by Henry Frendo, located in Urbino on July 14, 2012(see previous pages Nerik Mizzi honoured in Urbino, which is the communication made from the Maltese newspapers). The translation is done by Maria Luisa Biccari.Il 14 luglio 2012, a margine della pubblicazione del volume di Henry Frendo, Europe & Empire. Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean, Valletta, Midsea 2012 – e riprendendo un rapporto scientifico (del resto mai interrotto) fra Urbino e Malta – si è tenuta nella Sala Serpieri del Collegio Raffaello di Urbino una lezione su “Enrico Mizzi, Primo Ministro, studente urbinate”. L’autore, Henry Frendo (che già nel 2009 aveva pubblicato per Studi Urbinati il saggio su Colonialismo e nazionalismo nel Mediterraneo. La lotta partitica a Malta durante l’occupazione inglese tra assimilazione e resistenza) parte dalla collocazione di Enrico Mizzi nel quadro della lotta di Malta per la sua indipendenza dalla Gran Bretagna (che poi otterrà nel 1964) culminata anche simbolicamente nella prima metà del sec. XX nella c.d. “questione della lingua”, nel contrasto cioè fra l’inglese imposto dai dominatori e la “lingua maltese”, “quel caratteristico dialetto che suona dalle bocche delle donne così dolce e scorrevole, ma rotto e frastagliato dalla forte aspirazione semitica, accompagnato e quasi ricinto dalla sonora e melodiosa cadenza italiana” (E. Mizzi, Malta italiana, 1912). L’a. ha tratteggiato gli aspetti più rilevanti degli anni “italiani” e in particolare “urbinati” (1907-1912) della formazione del politico e poi Primo Ministro maltese Enrico Mizzi (laureatosi a Urbino appunto, nel 1912: che sono argomento di un capitolo, il IV, del volume recentemente pubblicato), e ha indugiato sui motivi di rilevanza politica e tecnico-giuridica della sua tesi di laurea il cui argomento (un auspicato nuovo contratto giornalistico di cui si sentiva necessità nel 1912) risulta di grande significato sia per la vita e le vicende del Primo Ministro, sia per il periodo storico italiano
“Ricucire il mondo”: il racconto dell’arte di Maria Lai
No full textMaria Lai (1919-2013) belongs to the constellation of artists who, with a subtle voice, knew how to shape her artistic experience by gracefully forcing the scans and rigid chronologies of a teleological and sexist art history.From the very beginning, her trajectory is gently aimed at a deep research that explores art as a space for verifying and modifying the condition of women and relational practices. She was foreign to the poetics of the art groups and she reflected on female work, bringing together personal memory and collective memory, through the emblematic and precious gesture of weaving. Her project has fluctuated over the years between an intimate dimension, that joined diary and autobiography through the stitching/writing of small stories embroidered on sheets as book pages, and a community and relational dimension through big environmental actions, such as the work Legarsi alla
montagna (Tying to the Mountain) (Ulassai, 1981).This essay aims to analyze the central points of this itinerary that in the encounter between
weaving, embroidery and writing explores in
an elegiac and intimate way the alterity of the
feminine condition and reflects on the sense of
bond, history and tradition within the community
The origins of Maltese statehood : a case study of decolonization in the Mediterranean
No full textCO 926, the main series of volumes containing the Colonial and Commonwealth Relations Offices’ original correspondence and papers, including Maltese affairs, between 1961 and 1964, were recently released in London. Professor Frendo is the first to see and to study these for a book from original sources (including the British intelligence reports) about how Malta really became independent. This has, as a backdrop, decolonization in the British Empire, Europe and the Mediterranean. Professor Frendo’s findings and analysis bring into the o[pen many so fat unknown facts, throwing new light on how and why the onetime fortress colony of Malta became independent from the British in 1964, who and what made it happen when it did. The Origins of Maltese Statehood thus offers new, engaging facts and insights on what for Malta and her people was, in the author’s words, “a parting of the way, a stepping out in to the world”.
Henry Frendo shows how Malta’s emergence to statehood in the early 1960s was all the more remarkable given the growing unrest in Cyprus, Libya and Aden, as well as the strained relations between East and West in the wake of the Cuba missile crisis, President Kennedy’s assassination, Soviet influence in Southern Europe including a naval presence in the Mediterranean, and the spreading of the nuclear weapons. Malta’s role in NATO (the Mediterranean forces of which she then headquartered), the possibility of her membership of the organization, and her part in evolving British and American strategy in the Mediterranean, are considered. So is a secret plan in 1963 for Malta’s integration with Italy after Independence. The book contains substantial biographical information, some of it novel and startling, on leading personalities including Dr Borg Olivier, MR Mintoff, Archbishop Gonzi and Police Commisioner De Gray (all of whom the author had also interviewed in the past) leading to the transfer of power in September 1964 – when, the book shows, there could have been a bloodbath.
As much a history of Malta as of Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s Britain in some respect, this story has the colonial and defence secretaries Duncan Sandys and Peter Thorneycroft as well as the Defence Chief, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, in pivotal roles. Here is a case study of the path to statehood of a former outpost of Empire, a key operational station at least until the 1956 Suez crisis, as well as a long-standing bastion of Christendom straddling in the North-South divide. Malta’s independence story unfolds in the related contexts of an unfolding Commonwealth, with its attendant challenges and perils; an increasingly exposed Southern flank; and the movement towards European integration.peer-reviewe
The Challenge of Subjectivity in Art History Between Globalism and Nationality: New Identity Practices
No full textAt the end of the 1980s, anthropologist Néstor García Canclini argued that inequality originates in the relationship between
global and local, and affects the modes of industrial, economic, and legislative production. In recent decades, art historians have developed
an anthropological approach, assuming that a focus on the person as individual subject and social component can be useful for deconstructing hegemonic discourses that intrinsically underly the Canonical Art History.
Starting from the reflections by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos on the “Ecologies of Knowledge ”, my contribution shows how a new concept of subjectivity and identity practices proposed by artists not only oppose nationalist rhetoric, but also avoid resorting to the rigid approach of the equally sectorial rhetoric of otherness
T.S. Eliot and the music of poetry
No full textThis thesis is a study of T.S. Eliot's poetry in the light of the different ways in which it can be considered 'musical'. Two concerns central to the thesis are: (1) Eliot's enduring interest in the musical quality of poetry; (2) the critical usefulness and viability of drawing analogies between his poetry and music. The thesis considers three important related topics: (1) Eliot's preoccupation with language, its inevitability and its inadequacy; (2) the figure of the seeker in his poetry; (3) his interest in mysticism. The thesis begins by exploring affinities between music and literature in the context of Wagner’s ideal of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and its influence on French Symbolist writers. It goes on to trace the development of T.S. Eliot's poetic style as influenced by the French Symbolist poets, by Dante and the mediaeval mystics, and by the music of Wagner, Stravinsky and other composers. Throughout, Eliot's poetry presents variations on the theme of detachment and involvement in relation to the figure of the seeker: consciousness is most engaged and challenged when it journeys. In the early poetry, music serves to emphasize failed relationships: the closer the physical proximity between protagonists, the greater the psychological distance. From The Waste Land on, Eliot makes use of myth and leitmotif to portray consciousness in the role of seeker urged on by the need for meaning. After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, Eliot's characters embark on a journey inward, where music, now "unheard", no longer signifies neurosis and despair, but becomes the only language for the ineffable
The dithyrambic dramatist: A Nietzschean musical-performative conception
No full textThe concept of the dithyrambic dramatist – introduced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations of 1873–76 – is one of the most performance-oriented concepts to emerge out of the nineteenth century in which theatre was often associated with dramatic literature. This article investigates the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist by tracing, in the first instance, the underlying musical perspectives – already evident in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 – which led Nietzsche to develop the concept. In the second instance, the author articulates what may be considered as its key conditions, namely the visible–audible and individual–collective relationalities. In view of the arguments brought forward, the concept of the dithyrambic dramatist is located as an interdisciplinary element that emerged out of an art form – music – to which Nietzsche was intimately associated in his youth as a composer. The author further proposes that, rather than a metaphor to philological tropes, the dithyrambic dramatist is a concrete manifestation of interdisciplinary and performative foundations that inform Nietzsche’s analytic perspectives.peer-reviewe
New Porphyrin Conjugates from azabicycloamidic for PDT Applications: from Synthesis to Photophysical properties
No full textOur research group has been exploring the synthetic versatility of 5,10,15,20 tetrakis(pentafluorophenyl)porphyrin (TPFFP) as a multipurpose scaffold to be efficiently and selectively derivatized by means of nucleophilic aromatic substitution reactions, devising a plethora of functional groups, generating libraries of photo-active compounds with biological interest. In this communication, an innovative functionalization of TPFFP, with different azabicyclic amidines will be reported. The structural characterization and the promising photophysical properties of the new compounds will be presented and discussed
Synthesis and photophysical evaluation of new porphyrin-azabicyclo conjugates for PDT applications
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