1,721,024 research outputs found
Africa in Venice. The Present
No full textThis chapter introduces the African and Afro-descendant artists and writers who have been revisiting the African element in Venetian art, an element examined by Paul Kaplan in the same book essay. These authors are arguably making a fundamental contribution to the decolonization of the Western imaginary, of which Venice has long been an iconic component and they are also writing a new chapter in the history of Venetian cosmopolitanism, whose more idealized versions often neglect its least palatable elements to extol its tolerance
William Shakespeare, Il mercante di Venezia
No full textComposed between 1596 and 1598, The Merchant of Venice skillfully weaves drama and comedy into a story that revolves around three unforgettable figures: Shylock, the tormented Jewish moneylender who demands a pound of flesh as penalty; Antonio, the melancholy merchant willing to sacrifice himself for a friend; and Portia, the noble heiress who cleverly and determinedly reverses everyone's fortunes. In a work where affections and interests intertwine in every character, Shakespeare explores universal themes such as justice, prejudice, and the complexity of human relationships. The result is a timeless classic, still capable of surprising and prompting reflection today. This edition, edited, translated and annotated by Shaul Bassi, Professor of English Literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, offers a modern and illuminating reading of one of the most fascinating masterpieces of Elizabethan theater
From the European South. A transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities 13 (2023) - Special Focus: Exploring New Routes in the Postcolonial Environmental Humanities
No full textAs the climate crisis unfolds, what is the role of postcolonial approaches to environmental and climate issues? How can the environmental humanities and postcolonial studies converge to illuminate each other’s blind spots? The SPECIAL FOCUS of FES 13 traces some of the routes that connect postcolonialism and the environmental humanities from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributors’ critical reflections tackle the debate on the schisms between postcolonialism and ecocriticism; the silenced toxic legacies of colonialism in Africa; the capacity of ‘nature’ to speak; soil as a new standpoint to discuss postcolonial Pacific poetry; the role of AI as a tool to connect posthumanism, postcolonialism and the Anthropocene; and indigenous contributions to the development of an ecological and political consciousness in the Americas
The Merchant in Venice. Shakespeare in the Ghetto
Full text linkThis book records the landmark performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the Jewish quarter that gave the world the word ‘ghetto’. Practitioners and critics discuss how this multi-ethnic production and its radical choice to cast five actors as Shylock provided the opportunity to respond creatively to Europe’s legacy of antisemitism, racism and difference. They observe how the place and play stand as ambivalent documents of civilization: instruments of intolerance but also sites of cultural exchange
Textus. English studies in Italy (2021). Vol. 34/3: Environmental humanities and english literary studies : facing the crisis of the immagination
No full textThis special issue Environmental Humanities and English Literary Studies: Facing the Crisis of the Imagination examines the state of the art of environmental and ecocritical approaches to English literary studies. The Environmental Humanities, subsuming ecocriticism, now offers themselves (at least in the anglosphere) as a broader cultural and academic paradigm aimed at interpreting, critiquing and transforming what Ghosh diagnoses as the "crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination" that concurs with the climate crisis. The Environmental Humanities encourage us to move beyond both the linguistic and cultural turns that have dominated the last half a century (while adapting their hermeneutic tools) to grapple with the affective materiality of the world, the agency of non-human species and new models of temporality. At the interface with postcolonial and critical race theory, the Environmental Humanities also invite us to explore the entanglements of the Anthropocene with the history of colonialism and imperialism, alongside forms of racial and social injustice that still structure global politics, especially the impact on migration. This issue, ranging from the early modern to the postmodern, includes an introduction by the editors Shaul Bassi and Emma Mason, and the following essays:
Rocco Coronato: The Wild Field. Stormbraining the Complex Rhythms of King Lear
Serena Baiesi: Mary Shelley and the Anthropocene:
An Eco-feminist Reading of The Last Man
Sarah Hughes Losing Eden: Ruskin and the Anthropocene
in the Veneto and England
Stefano Rozzoni The Georgians and the Environmental Imagination:
Re-evaluating Georgian Poetry (1911-1912) through an Ecocritical Lens Paolo Bugliani
Modern(ist) fables. Notes on Some Animals Inhabiting Early 20th-century Short Stories Carmen Gallo Not Not Not Not Not Enough: Caryl Churchill’s ecological drama and commitment
Roberta Grandi “Animals don’t behave like men... They have dignity and animality.” Richard Adams’s Watership Down and interspecies relationships in the Anthropocene
Carmen Concilio The Garden as Democratic Space: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers
Giulia Champion ‘The River Has Been Put on Tap’: Decolonising Water
and Historiography in V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River
(1979) and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011
New directions: The Names of the Rose: Romeo and Juliet in Italy
No full textThe Names of the Rose: Romeo and Juliet in Italy
Bringing Romeo and Juliet back to their native Italy provokes a set of questions that illuminate the larger issue of how Shakespeare moves in space and time, across languages, cultures, and different media. By focusing on key episodes and individuals in the afterlife of the best known 'Italian' play by Shakespeare, the essay will explore different aspects of Romeo and Juliet. I will look at how the story travelled from Italy to Shakespeare and back to Italy, being translated, circulated, adapted, rewritten, commodified, reconfigured through local cultural, religious and aesthetic codes. What did the Italian setting and plot mean for Shakespeare? How does a different cultural, linguistic, religious episteme affect the reception and reconfiguration of a play? How does Shakespeare influence his sources? How does a Shakespearean myth become commodified, fetishized, trivialized? What is the function of Medieval Italy in the early modern vs. postmodern imaginary? To what extent is an actor a critic of Shakespeare (with her body, gender, age, speech, gestural vocabulary, etc.)? How does the city of Verona deal with its world famous myth? The essay will also discuss how a literary myth can overflow the boundaries of the aesthetic and spill into other domains such as onomastics, tourism, industry, advertising, etc. Specific texts considered will include Eleonora Duse's interpretation of Juliet, Francesco Hayez's Romantic painting, and the famous banner unrolled by Neapolitan soccer fans at Verona stadium, as a retort to the local hooligans racist slogans inciting Mount Vesuvius to turn Naples into a new Pompei: "Juliet is a whore".
(Shaul Bassi, Università Ca'Foscari Venezia
Introduction: Venice and the Anthropocene
No full textIntroduction to Venice and the Anthropocene: an ecocritical guide
The floating price of beauty: Water and land management in Venice through the centuries
No full textMany actions promoted by the Serenissima through the centuries in order to manage the fragile balance of the lagoon triggered political, economic, environmental, and social issues both within the Republic and with neighbouring states. As it often happens in water management, fixing a problem at one point means causing other problems elsewhere: and Venice learned this lesson only too well. Another effect, however, was that in the Lagoon human and environmental history became so entangled that it would be hardly possible (and certainly pointless) to treat them separately. And in fact, in the stream of professional and public debates which arose from – and in turn, shaped – Venice’s efforts to manage a constantly changing environment, we can find the same mass of environmental, scientific, social, political, cultural, economic issues that we are facing today at a global level
Il prezzo ondeggiante della bellezza. L’equilibrismo di Venezia tra acqua e terra nel corso dei secoli
No full textMolti degli interventi promossi dalla Serenissima nel corso della sua storia per preservare il fragile equilibrio lagunare innescarono controversie (spesso ferocissime) di natura politica, economica, ambientale e sociale. Controversie che infuriarono sia all’interno dei confini repubblicani, sia tra la Repubblica e gli stati confinanti. Come spesso accade nella gestione delle acque, infatti (e come Venezia imparò a caro prezzo), risolvere i problemi in un punto significa causarne di nuovi altrove. Ma un altro effetto di questo travaglio plurisecolare fu che nella Laguna Veneta storia umana e storia naturale s’intrecciarono a tal punto che sarebbe pressoché impossibile, e di certo inutile, trattarle separatamente. Non a caso, nel fiume di dibattiti che scaturirono da – e che, a loro volta, plasmarono – lo sforzo della Serenissima di gestire un ambiente in continuo mutamento, riconosciamo lo stesso groviglio di problemi ambientali, scientifici, sociali, politici, culturali ed economici con cui oggi dobbiamo misurarci a livello globale
Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe
Full text linkPostcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of six- teen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of mi- grants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European pol- itics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Ro- meo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe
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