Italy is out

Description

The internationally renowned documentary photographer in conversation with Professor Derek Duncan (University of St Andrews), Professor Charles Burdett (University of London) and Dr. Antonia Dawes (King’s College London).

The speakers will discuss the book Italy is Out recently published in the UK (Liverpool University Press) by Mario Badagliacca and Derek Duncan, fruit of the collaboration between the photographer and the research team of ‘Translationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures’, a ARHC-funded project which explored the implications of Italian migration in a global perspective tracing cultural transformations across borders, generations and language.

Italy is Out is the fruit of the collaboration between Mario Badagliacca, the established documentary photographer, and the research team of Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures (2014-16). This ARHC-funded project explored the implications of Italian migration in a global perspective tracing cultural transformations across borders, generations, and language. Badagliacca visited some of the project’s key locations conducting interviews with Italians or people of Italian descent before photographing them in familiar locations. The subjects of the portraits were invited to bring along three objects representing their attachment to Italy. The sheer variety of the objects which appear alongside the portraits suggest the diversity of the migrant experience. Photographs shot in London, New York, and Buenos Aires feature members of the historical Italian community, but also first generation migrants in search of opportunities not offered at home. A similar complexity emerges, more unexpectedly, in the postcolonial Italian communities of Tunis and Addis Abeba. The photographs are accompanied by essays written by members of the research team and people who have in some way participated in the project. Fiction, autobiography and academic reflection sit side by side adding to Badagliacca’s multifaceted exploration of Italians abroad.

Mario Badagliacca is a freelance Sicilian photographer. He studied international relations and politics at the University 'L'Orientale' in Naples and photo-reportage and photojournalism in Rome. Along his photographic activity, he has always collaborated with non-profit organizations and been involved in humanitarian programmes. His work documents migration, life on the borders, human right violations, and social issues.

Charles Burdett is currently Director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London His main areas of research are literary culture under Fascism, travel writing, the Italian colonial presence in Libya and east Africa and its legacy, theories of intercultural contact and the rep- resentation of Islam and the Islamic world in recent Italian literature and culture. He was principal investigator of the collaborative research project Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures (2014–17). He is one of the co-editors of both Transnational Italian Studies (2019) and Transcultural Italies: Mobility Memory and Translation (2020).

Derek Duncan is Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews. He has published extensively on modern Italian culture, particularly on intersections of gender/sexuality and of race/ ethnicity in a transnational frame-work. He is increasingly engaged with developments in the creative humanities and in the fusion of academic research and creative practice. With Jennifer Burns, he is co-editor of Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook (forthcoming 2022).

Antonia Lucia Dawes is an Anglo-Neapolitan writer based at Kings College London who works on questions of racism and militarism. Her book, Race Talk: languages of racism and resistance in Neapolitan street markets (2020 Manchester University Press), is about racism and multilingual communication. She is currently working on a new collaborative book project about the British military presence on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England.

Period	7 Dec 2021
Held at	Italian Cultural Institute UK, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International