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As one of the best-known survivors of the concentration camps, Primo Levi's testimony to his experiences in Auschwitz is internationally recognised as one of the most significant works of the last century. This volume examines each of Levi's works in detail, assessing and analysing the influence of Levi's time in Auschwitz on his writing. It identifies a variety of thematic, temporal, stylistic and linguistic echoes of Levi's concentration camp testimony, and traces these echoes throughout his subsequent, apparently unrelated, work. The book provides original and fascinating insights into the works of this remarkable writer, giving readers a new understanding and perspective on the immense significance and the pervasive influence of the holocaust on Levi's creative output.
"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I've never seen it." Mafiosi have often reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforcement. Social scientists who study the Mafia usually try to pin down what it "really is," thus fusing their work with their object. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquiry that focuses not on answering "What is the Mafia?" but on the ontological, moral, and political effects of posing the question itself. Her starting point is that Mafia is not a readily nameable social fact but a problem of thought produced by the absence of words. Puccio-Den approaches covert activities using a model of "Mafiacraft," which inverts the logic of witchcraft. If witchcraft revolves on the lethal power of speech, Mafiacraft depends on the deadly strength of silence. How do we write an ethnography of phenomena that cannot be named? Puccio-Den approaches this task with a fascinating anthropology of silence, breaking new ground for the study of the world’s most famous criminal organization.
The authors consider the origins of Eurocommunism in the post-war politics of Mediterranean Europe and the continuing process of de-Stalinization and its effects on relations between the Communist Parties and other social movements and on the policies of the Soviet Bloc, the USA, and the EEC.
By extending the chronological parameters of existing scholarship, and by focusing on legal experts' overriding and enduring concern with 'dangerous' forms of common crime, this study offers a major reinterpretation of criminal-law reform and legal culture in Italy from the Liberal (1861–1922) to the Fascist era (1922–43). Garfinkel argues that scholars have long overstated the influence of positivist criminology on Italian legal culture and that the kingdom's penal-reform movement was driven not by the radical criminological theories of Cesare Lombroso, but instead by a growing body of statistics and legal researches that related rising rates of crime to the instability of the Italian state. Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its relationship to contemporary penal-reform movements abroad.
This collection of essays provides a comprehensive account of the culture of modern Italy. Contributions focus on a wide range of political, historical and cultural questions. The volume provides information and analysis on such topics as regionalism, the growth of a national language, social and political cultures, the role of intellectuals, the Church, the left, feminism, the separatist movements, organised crime, literature, art, design, fashion, the mass media, and music. While offering a thorough history of Italian cultural movements, political trends and literary texts over the last century and a half, the volume also examines the cultural and political situation in Italy today and suggests possible future directions in which the country might move. Each essay contains suggestions for further reading on the topics covered. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture is an invaluable source of materials for courses on all aspects of modern Italy.
Discusses renowned masters including Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, as well as directors lesser known outside Italy like Dino Risi and Ettore Scola. The author examines overlooked Italian genre films such as horror movies, comedies, and Westerns, and he also devotes attention to neglected periods like the Fascist era. He illuminates the epic scope of Italian filmmaking, showing it to be a powerful cultural force in Italy and leaving no doubt about its enduring influence abroad. Encompassing the social, political, and technical aspects of the craft, the author recreates the world of Italian cinema.
Relying on previously undisclosed confessions of former mafia members now cooperating with the police, Letizia Paoli provides a clinically accurate portrait of mafia behavior, motivations, and structure in Italy. The mafia, Paoli demonstrates, are essentially multifunctional ritual brotherhoods focused above all on retaining and consolidating their local political power base. A truly interdisciplinary work of history, politics, economics, and sociology, Mafia Brotherhoods reveals in dramatic detail the true face of one of the world's most mythologized criminal organizations.
Italy is a country of recent decline and long-standing idiosyncratic traits. A rich society served by an advanced manufacturing economy, where the rule of law is weak and political accountability low, it has long been in downward spiral alimented by corruption and clientelism. From this spiral has emerged an equilibrium as consistent as it is inefficient, that raises serious obstacles to economic and democratic development. The Political Economy of Italy's Decline explains the causes of Italy's downward trajectory, and explains how the country can shift to a fairer and more efficient system. Analysing both political economic literature and the history of Italy from 1861 onwards, The Politica...
The Urkommunismus (the ideal place, the common place, the utopia, the pure place of origin) presides over every mysterious, therefore political, penal, social, financial, institutional, corporate doctrine, and dictates its canons, formulas, algorithms. It is the reference of every bureaucracy in its sacrificial, penal ceremonial. On the principle of nothingness, every regime unravels the fear of the word, to confiscate life. Ideally and really. Both “to the East” and “to the West”. In this book the analysis and reading are performed of the writings called “founding”, which mark our age, weighing down, in its models and its offices. The result is the text of the word, as well as t...
New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies. Volume 1: Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices is a collection of essays that identifies a number of different approaches in cultural studies and in Italian cultural studies in particular. It highlights that history of cultural studies and new developments in the field as well focuses on practicing cultural studies with essays devoted to Italian hip hop culture, postcolonial Italy and queer diaspora, Occidentalism in Japan, Italian racism and colonialism.