1,721,140 research outputs found
Peace, War, and Critique
Get PDFThis article offers a brief exploration of the contradictory meanings of "war" and "peace", beginning with the ways in which, paradoxically, one term is supposed to engender its opposite. Inspired by sources as diverse as James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Judith Butler, the author tries to imagine what it would take to break the war-and-peace continuum
The red and the black: Images of American Indians in the Italian political landscape
Get PDFIn Italy, over the last decades, both the Left and the Right have repeatedly employed American Indians as political icons. The Left and the Right, that is, both adopted and adapted certain real or often outright invented features of American Indian culture and history to promote their own ideas, values, and political campaigns. The essay explores how well-established stereotypes such as those of the ecological Indian, the Indian as victim, and the Indian as fearless warrior, have often surfaced in Italian political discourse. The “Indiani Metropolitani” student movement resorted to “Indian” imagery and concepts to rejuvenate the languages of the old socialist and communist left, whereas the Right has for the most part preferred to brandish the Indian as an image of a bygone past, threatened by modernization and, especially, by immigration. Indians are thus compared to contemporary Europeans, struggling to resist being invaded by “foreign” peoples. While both the Left and the Right reinvent American Indians for their own purposes, and could be said to practice a form of cultural imperialism, the essay argues that the Leftist appropriations of the image of the Indian were always marked by irony. Moreover, while the Right’s Indians can be seen as instances of what Walter Benjamin (1969) described as Fascism’s aestheticization of politics, groups like the Indiani Metropolitani tried to politicize the aesthetics
Agostino Lombardo, americanista: Studi Americani in prospettiva storica
Get PDFA tentative balance sheet of Studi Americani, on the occasion of its digitalization. Against the
backdrop of current debates on the internationalization of American Studies, the role
played by Agostino Lombardo in promoting an Italian approach to the study of American
literature in Ital
Are Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce the inventors of the American “anti-war” story?
Get PDFThe essay explores the extent to which the originators of the modern American war story can also be considered as anti-war writers. The notion of what it means to be "anti-war" is also explored
Walls that Bridge. Or, What we can learn from the Roman walls
Get PDFWhen, during the latest US electoral campaign, Pope Francis criticized Trump’s idea of building a wall between Mexico and the US, reiterat- ing his favorite point that “we do not need to build walls, but bridges,” the Trump camp retorted that the Pope lives in a city state surrounded by walls, in a city itself surrounded by other walls dating back to ancient Roman times. Why wasn’t he concerned with those walls? As one can see, even though Roman walls have completely lost their original func- tion and survive mainly as tourist sites, they also remain powerful political and cultural symbols. The scope of this essay is to offer, from the perspective of an Americanist who was born and raised in Rome, some comparative reflections on what we can learn today from the his- tory of Roman walls, as well as from their symbolic afterlives
Introduzione
No full textThe essay provides an intoduction to a special issue of the journal I edited, on the fiction written in response to World War II in a variety of national and international contexts
Alce Nero scrive: la stampa indiana negli anni '60 e '70
No full textUno studio delle pubblicazioni periodiche degli Indiani d'America nel periodo che va dai primi anni '60 sino alla fine degli anni '70. In questo periodo, generalmente definito "American Indian Renaissance" i periodici indiani svolgono un ruolo fondamentale nel ridefinire l'identità indiano-americana
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