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This is a book about a small Southern Italian village and its offshoots in Toronto. It's about bread and figs and food in general, about Carnival and pilgrimages to religious sanctuaries, about fathers, mothers and children, about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you've stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you've gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change. But it's also about what it may mean to write an ethnography of the place you've chosen to continue to inhabit and about how an array of houses in one of the most forlorn backwaters of Europe can actually be in the thick of current history. Mixing fiction and non-fiction, autobiography, portraits of friends and co-villagers, anecdotes, short tales and the reflections of the specialist, it's also about how anthropology can be literature and literature anthropology. In short, it's a book sure to become a classic.
In this transnational analysis of women and gender in Italy's world-wide migration, Franca Iacovetta and Donna Gabaccia challenge the stereotype of the Italian immigrant woman as silent and submissive; a woman who stays 'in the shadows.'
Imagination Besieged records the silenced stories of a Mediterranean defined by loss, displacement, dispossession, violence, and its refusal. Drawing links and connections between Calabria, Athens, Ramallah, and Beirut, the book grapples with the legacies of histories of violence, criminality, and colonialism that define not only the past, but very much the present of a Mediterranean stuck in cycles of crises and death. This atmosphere of impossibility and immobility, as the author argues, debilitates and distorts imagination as much as it forces those subjected to it to find ways to express their dissent, sometimes in tragic ways. The book invites to read with the “Mediterranean” as a s...
Calabria is one of the oldest civilised regions of Europe. In antiquity, the philosophy, science, literature and poetry of the Greek Pythagoreans flourished here; in the Middle Ages, the Norman Kingdom was the most cultured and opulent civilisation in the world. However, in modern times, Calabria has suffered from the almost complete neglect of its multi-facetted cultural legacy by dominant foreign ruling powers, declining into a third world region at the toe of the Italian peninsula. This book directs the attention of the world to those immense disregarded riches, through a collection of essays on the region’s history, arts and crafts, its philosophy and substantial intellectual legacy and especially its rejuvenation among the younger generations of today. Each of the 16 chapters was written by a scholar with unique experience in their field of research. They will be immensely useful for academics as well as students interested in Mediterranean culture.
This book offers a unique mapping of Mediterranean cultures and histories in transnational contexts. A diverse collection of diasporic scholars stage a critical examination of transmediterranean subjects across a broad spectrum of geopolitical spaces that encompasses India, Greece, Palestine, Sudan, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and Libya. Focusing on the transnational dispersions and heterogeneous embodiments of Mediterranean cultures, this book examines how these cultures, geopolitical spaces and subjects are caught within flows of exchange, contestation and reconfiguration. Working in the interstices of global formations, the essays in this volume proceed to articulate transmediterranean affiliations that challenge the borders and limits of the nation-state.
The experience of democratic self-government of migration practiced in the village of Riace, Calabria, is an important case study for the potential development of migration in relation to three aspects of last Italian government’s policies, all of which have both European and international relevance: the failure to sign the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration; the securitarian management of the migration crisis; and distorted media narratives around migration. This book derives from the collective efforts of a group of young social scientists in the fields of politics, law, economic geography, and media analysis, all of whom have past and present practical experience in the field. The book focuses on the high-impact local policies implemented in the small Calabrian village which turned out to possess one of the best vantage points for examining human migration on a global level. The volume represents an attempt to speak to a broad public in order to challenge ‘common sense’ and easy narratives on the complex issue of migration.
This book presents emerging perspectives on disaster resilience and human settlements in the larger context of the Anthropocene. The chapters explore urban and rural perspectives focusing on the current and emerging perspectives on disaster resilience through a holistic approach, involving scientists, humanists, planners, policymakers, and professionals in the global debate.
Race as Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and socio-historical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qual...
This collection pushes migration and "the minor" to the fore of literary anthropology. What happens when authors who thematize their “minority” background articulate notions of belonging, self, and society in literature? The contributors use “interface ethnography” and “fieldwork on foot” to analyze a broad selection of literature and processes of dialogic engagement. The chapters discuss German-speaking Herta Müller’s perpetual minority status in Romania; Bengali-Scottish Bashabi Fraser and the potentiality of poetry; vagrant pastoralism and “heritagization” in Puglia, Italy; the self-representation of European Muslims post 9/11 in Zeshan Shakar’s acclaimed Norwegian no...
This collection of essays examines obesity not as an objective medical or psychological problem, but as a subjective social and cultural phenomenon. The contributors take a cross-cultural perspective, examining both the negative casting of obesity in developed countries and the traditional view of obesity as a positive characteristic in subsistence societies which is threatened by the dominance of Western culture.